IMC established a disaster recovery and replication strategy to recover the Harris Farm business operations after the IT hub was destroyed by fire.
Harris Farm is a family owned and run fresh produce retailer. It has been in operation for over 35 years and employs 800 staff in 20 different retail locations. Harris Farm’s headquarters is at Sydney’s Paddy’s Markets, Flemington and is the hub of all Harris Farm activities.
The Challenge
At 6.45am on 13 March, Andrew Gifford, Technology Services Director at IMC Communications, received a call from Angus Harris after a fire caused by a suspected electrical fault had ripped through the Harris Farm premises and gutted the company’s IT hub. Harris Farm needed immediate disaster recovery assistance; the solution needed to be fresh and delivered fast.
As a long standing client, Harris Farm had relied on IMC Communications in the past for IT hardware, new servers and communications consultancy. With a sense of critical urgency, IMC was called upon again.
“I reached Andrew Gifford as IMC was about to commence an in-house engineering workshop… which, upon hearing of our dilemma, was promptly changed to a DR planning session for us,” said Angus Harris.
One of the big casualties of the fire was Harris Farm’s Central Market System, a proprietary software program the organisation had developed over 25 years. The system was designed to store data and provide intelligence on purchases, sales, management accounts, daily stock and sales information, and was relied upon for profit and loss potential analysis.
The unanticipated disaster resulted in the loss of five days’ worth of valuable data. Those based at Harris Farm’s operations centre were left with no record of the stock coming in – including what and how much needed to be distributed to retail outlets across the state – that morning.
The Solution
“IMC dropped everything to beg and borrow to source for us all the technical equipment we needed to get our IT system up and running in time.
“Astoundingly, by midday IMC had all the necessary replacement equipment to us and my team of electricians had cables re-routed to a makeshift IT centre in one of our offices not affected by the fire.”
By 6pm the computer room had been set up with a file server, AS400, mail server, routers, switches, firewall and tape back-up, so when the buyers came in the following morning they could access all stock levels and order information sent from the stores.
“We were proud to ensure Harris Farm was able to continue effective operations immediately after the fire. Our team was driven by the objective of minimising damage to both financial performance and reputation that could potentially result in negative, long term business ramifications,” said Andrew Gifford, Technology Services Director at IMC Communications.
The installation of a disaster recovery back up plan for any business is imperative because even if you place an order for replacement IT equipment the minute disaster strikes, it usually takes a minimum of eight weeks to be delivered and installed. Preparation is the key.
It took approximately three months to return to normal Harris Farm operations with all the new hardware and software in place.
Harris warns any businesses without disaster recovery facilities to be aware of the consequences should the unexpected happen and they lose their vital information and means of communications.
“The two most valuable pieces of advice I can give are to quickly call on experts like IMC that can help you get up and running as quickly as possible; and to ensure you have confidence in your service providers as we did because you need to give them a certain amount of control in order to get the job done,” says Gifford.
BENEFITS
IMC’S disaster recovery response and advice resulted in the following outcomes for Harris Farm:
1. After only eight weeks following the devastating fire, IMC organised the selection, purchase and delivery of Harris farm’s new equipment to restore and resume the company’s IT operations hub.
2. IMC implemented a Disaster Recovery Solution using VMware that has virtual servers at the Production site and replicates these to the Disaster Recovery site. Using virtual servers has the benefits of flexibility, lower hardware costs and lower operational costs at both sites.
3. Now Harris Farm is protected with a disaster recovery plan, the estimated recovery time for critical applications is under 6 hours.
4. IMC will review and test the disaster recovery system and equipment every six months to maintain and update all systems.
