Manufacturing
Carlsberg brews success with Double-Take
28 February 2008
Carlsberg UK has completed the implementation of a Double-Take business continuity solution at its Leeds Brewery. Double-Take Software, through its partner Polestar, has provided Carlsberg with a data protection and recovery solution running on Windows Server 2003, to ensure the continued availability of key IT systems that control brewing operations.
Carlsberg’s Leeds operation is one of the company’s two major breweries in the UK, with total production of three million hectolitres of beer each year. Operations at the brewery are crucially dependent on the availability of various key IT systems. The new solution continuously replicates the data required by Carlsberg’s brewery management systems from production to target servers. In the event that production servers fail, users failover to target servers so that they are able carry on working, with little or no interruption to service and data.
“We are delighted that Carlsberg has chosen to use Double-Take Software at the Leeds Brewery,” said Ian Masters, UK sales director at Double-Take Software. “All of the staff at Double-Take Software are of course familiar with Carlsberg. Helping to protect its business and ensure a continuous supply of its products to consumers is something that we can all take great pride in.”
“For Carlsberg, the main benefit has been guaranteed availability of a critical system, SCADA,” said Graeme Walker, senior systems engineer at Carlsberg UK. “There have also been other significant benefits. Because the Double-Take solution works so well, maintenance of our servers has been greatly simplified. If we need to investigate problems, install patches and implement server or software upgrades, we are able to manually failover to the target units, leaving us free to work on the production servers without compromising performance.
“Another benefit of having two identical datasets is that we are able run our tape backup from the target servers. This means that the backup process doesn’t interfere with production performance and we are able to run the backups during standard working hours,” Walker concluded.