Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies

As one of the world’s leading contract manufacturing organisations for the biopharmaceutical industry, Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies has to meet stringent industry regulations and client requirements for business continuity. When the company implemented a virtual data center it looked to optimise its recovery point and time objectives with a real-time replication DR solution.

Business Challenges

Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies offers process development and drug manufacturing facilities and services, working with biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies to help them develop and manufacture a broad range of innovative products to improve human and animal health.

Business Continuity is of upmost importance to Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies. As a manufacturer of pharmaceutical products the firm must show that they have a disaster recovery plan in place. Furthermore, the impact of unscheduled downtime would affect profitability and require more investment in order to deal with the aftermath.

Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies recently moved its data center to its manufacturing facility in Billingham, UK and completely redesigned its infrastructure to incorporate both physical and virtual (VMware) environments, as not all applications are supported by the application provider on a virtual platform. With their existing “ship-to-site” disaster recovery (DR) contract coming to an end, the challenge was to find a solution that provided DR for both the physical and virtual worlds while improving Recovery Time Objectives.

“We know that recovery in the event of a system or location incident is only as good as the last backup that has been taken. Looking at the options, approaches based on snapshots or scheduled backups would leave us with a hole in our data that would be unacceptable. When we understood the significant benefit we could gain from real-time protection in reducing not only our target recovery time objective but also recovery point objective, we were compelled to find a best-fit solution that would include this,” said IT & ASV Manager of Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies.

Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies had a number of mission critical applications and considerable data that needed to be protected in the event of a disaster. Research and manufacturing relies on access to several key applications, including SAP for managing materials, manufacturing and production processes, chromatography systems that handle product analysis and several web applications. The organisation relies heavily on email for both internal and external communication, and must retain data supporting pharmaceutical research and manufacturing for a minimum of 10 years.

Solution

After comparing a number of disaster recovery solutions, Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies selected Frontier Continuity Service, our private cloud disaster recovery service. It provides real-time replication and ensures high availability and disaster recovery for the company’s critical applications, without the need for a second site.

Taking a phased approach to moving over to the new system, initially Frontier Continuity Service provided protection for the company’s email system, file server, external facing DNS server and domain. The second phase expanded coverage to the company’s SAP ECC production systems, while the third phase focused on the company’s chromatography data and electronic document management systems. “Frontier Continuity Service is based on Double-Take Availability. The solution is simple to implement and the DR-as-a-service approach has delivered significant cost benefits. There is no upfront spend on hardware required from us, and there is minimal management overhead. We simply have a predictable rental model of payment,” said the IT & ASV Manager, FujiFilm. “We have developed a great relationship with Frontier Technology and have already seen how much easier it is to run DR trials and tests. The Frontier team has helped us implement and test our new DR process quickly and efficiently” he added.

Frontier Continuity Service uses Double-Take Availability to replicate Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies servers to the Frontier cloud service, located at its secure data center. Double-Take Availability continuously monitors and replicates changes made to open files as they occur. It automatically and rapidly copies the changes to the remote site where secondary server is running on the Frontier Continuity Service cloud. In the event of a production system being disrupted or taken offline for maintenance, users can be quickly switched to the secondary server and carry on as normal.

Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies has realised the benefits of real-time replication from Frontier Continuity Service across its virtual and Windows environments. “We have been able to reduce our Recovery Time Objective from days to a couple of hours and our Recovery Point Objective from 24 hours to just 2 hours,” stated the IT Manager. “Frontier Continuity Service, backed by Double-Take Availability has proved a winning choice for our business.”

Organisation Profile:

FujiFilm Diosynth Biotechnologies is one of the world’s leading contract manufacturing organisations for the biopharmaceutical industry.

Business Situation:

The organisation has to meet stringent industry regulations and client requirements for business continuity. They were looking for a cost-effective, real time replication disaster recovery solution.

The Solution:

Frontier Continuity Service

Key Benefits:

• FujiFilm fulfilled their compliance and customer business continuity requirements.
• Non-stop user accessibility even during planned maintenance.
• No management overhead is incurred.
• No second site is required.