23 February 2007

One of Switzerland's oldest private banks, founded in Geneva in 1819, Mirabaud has been building expertise in alternative asset management for 30 years. The Company employs 350 people with offices in 9 countries throughout the world and provides brokerage services in London, Hong Kong and Geneva, as well as asset management and risk management.

Mirabaud has an open architecture and independent management approach which enables its managers to select the best external products, complementing those developed in-house. In formulating its investment strategies, Mirabaud managers rely largely on internal data resources for financial analysis, market tables, qualitative and quantitative analysis, selection of funds and liaison with a team of specialists around the world.

Mirabaud needed to ensure that its London-based critical application data server – which provides information to its network of managers – offers high availability and has the ability to perform off-site data replication in order to meet business continuity requirements.

"The key challenge is to be able to provide Mirabaud's users with access to uninterrupted data to continue business operations in the event of a disaster situation or server failure," said Russell Sparshot, network analyst at Mirabaud. "We needed replication and mirroring software for recovery in the event of server failure, and a robust disaster recovery solution in the unlikely event that all our systems at 21 St James Square were unavailable."

CWL analysed Mirabaud's requirements for high data availability and recommended Double-Take to fulfil its client's data replication needs.

Double-Take Software's data replication product, Double-Take, now ensures the protection of Mirabaud's key data server, which holds business- critical information. This solution delivered effective data protection through continuous replication, as well as centralised backup, high availability and recovery.

"Having discussed with CWL the various server back office solutions available, Double-Take came out as a clear winner – it is simply the most easy-to-use, reliable and cost effective solution for replicating our data," said Sparshott. "What also appealed was the ability to expand the solution, for example to provide failover to a remote location at a future date. In other words, the solution works well with the services we have today and will be compatible with whatever best-of-breed hardware and software we may require tomorrow. We found Double-Take's no-nonsense approach to licensing an added bonus too – one license covers all our needs and it gives us the option to use the product with different Microsoft systems in the future."

"In terms of the actual implementation, we were impressed by the comprehensive guide provided with the software, which enabled us to very quickly develop a reasonable knowledge of the installation and management prior to deployment," said Sparshott.

The IT Department was also attracted by the ongoing solution support that is offered by Double-Take Software for all its clients. 24-7 telephone support is available to clients such as Mirabaud as part of the initial product purchase.

Mirabaud now has a robust disaster recovery solution for its central data server, with all information replicated to a secondary server continuously capturing byte-level changes as they happen. In the event of a failover, data will be able to be accessed within minutes rather than days or hours, providing a business continuity solution to ensure the smooth running of the ongoing operations.

Add a comment