North West Provincial Government of South
The North West Provincial Government is a state government for the North West
province in the Country of South Africa.
The North West Provincial Government’s IT department is tasked with providing
services to their many constituents. With more than 4,000 GroupWise (8 Domains
and 6 Post Offices, 2 GWIA's and 1 WebAccess) users to administer, Thys de Beer, has his hands full.
To help the IT department provide backup, quick restore and disaster recovery for
GroupWise, they employ GWAVA Reload for backing up their GroupWise system. A
recent scare illustrated the powerful backup and disaster recovery functionality of
Reload.
Challenge
One recent morning, de Beer saw the following error message on the server console
of one of his NetWare servers: Server failed to boot.
“We had a total hardware failure on our main domain and post office server that
hosts mail for thousands of users,” he recalled. “The post office size was around
195GBs though all other domains and six post offices were still in place.”
Complete panic set in as he first tried to “revive” the hardware at all costs,
returning at 23h55, but still no fix. When this failed, the only fallback he had was
their backups.
“Luckily we were running Reload. I checked and saw that the last backup ran was
the previous night, which was 100% as scheduled as part of our daily weekday
schedule,” said de Beer.
De Beer is quick to mention that for almost four years they did not have any backup
and had been running Reload for only the last 10 months. “Imagine the scare I had.
I already could see myself fixing PCs from home as my ‘new’ career.”
Panic Turns to Recovery
“I knew about the disaster recovery option from Reload, but hadn’t set it up before
- always tomorrow - you know how it goes in IT, always something else that must be
done now.”
So, he reached out to GWAVA South Africa and asked for help. GWAVA’s Tay Kratzer, Reload Developer, was available. Kratzer helped set up the failed GroupWise post
office to run on the GWAVA Reload server. Within a short time the failed GroupWise
post office was running on the Reload box and de Beer’s users could access the post
office again (after one DNS entry update).
They then kicked off the Reload post office migration feature but had no idea how
long that would take. The pre-migration of approximately 90% of the data being
migrated was restored from the NAS (NetApp iSCSI connected R200 device) the
Reload server is connected to, to the production server in around 18 hours. The
pre-migration migrated 175 GB of data.
While the pre-migration of the post office was running, the post office was still up
and functioning fully on the Reload server. The Reload server was also backing up
other GroupWise post offices and domains that are regularly scheduled for backups
each day.
Once the Reload server had pre-migrated the data to the production server, De Beer
then unloaded the live post office agent on the Reload server to start with the final
portion of the post office migration (the last 10%). That was done in around three
hours. Once this was completed, he installed the GroupWise Agent software to the
production server and loaded the post office agent (POA). The post office was all up
and running.
“GWAVA Reload works brilliantly. If you are a GroupWise administrator, get yourself
GWAVA Reload and set up disaster recovery for all post offices and domains before
disaster strikes. Once it’s set up and tested it is merely a ‘flip of the switch’ while
your users can work seamlessly and uninterrupted.”