Hotpoint deploys Standby for near-zero data loss

Their situation

Hotpoint Appliances is one of Africa’s largest retailers and wholesalers of consumer electronics and entertainment products with wholesale, logistics and distribution businesses in Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania. Hotpoint is a true 24/7 business with online stores and round-the-clock delivery of products to dealers, hypermarkets and supermarkets.

Hotpoint’s existing disaster recovery solution no longer met their uptime and recovery speed requirements. The solution consisted of in-house scripts, cron jobs and custom database replication procedures to provide data redundancy. However, the homegrown system resulted in poor Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) metrics. Furthermore, it was a risk in terms of ongoing supportability by staff.

As any outage would have a serious impact on customer loyalty and their brand, Hotpoint contracted Sybl, a support partner of theirs for six years with headquarters in Uganda, to provide a best practice data recovery solution for their Orion ERP and Oracle Standard Edition databases at their newly constructed headquarters in Kenya.

Overview

Solution:

The existing homegrown DR solution had poor RTO and RPO performance which was a risk in regards to serviceability
Hotpoint and Sybl chose Standby™ due to its compatibility with Oracle Standard Edition, resilience against disasters, minimal data loss, fast recovery and ease of use
Regular Disaster Recovery tests are now easily run on a quarterly basis without impacting the production system

Results:

Since deploying Standby™, Hotpoint has achieved recovery times of less than 15 minutes with almost zero data loss

How we helped the client

Key design criteria for the new disaster recovery solution and data center were; 1) the ability to cope with Kenya’s notoriously unreliable power network. 2) Strong resilience including major hardware failures 3) Fast recovery times with minimal data loss 4) Easy supportability by in-house staff.

Sybl and Hotpoint chose Standby™ to provide best practice protection of their databases after a number of successful Proof of Concept projects. Subhash Pakhare from Sybl says that after looking at many options, they were impressed by Standby™ due to its use of similar technology to Oracle Data Guard without the need to upgrade to Oracle Enterprise Edition. “Once we identified the need for replication of the Oracle database, we looked at options. Dbvisit Standby provided us with database replication whilst retaining use of Hotpoint’s Oracle Standard Edition licenses without the need to license DataGuard or upgrade to Oracle Enterprise”.

The disaster recovery solution consists of an Orion ERP, Oracle Standard Edition database, with Standby™ disaster recovery software replicating to a standby server. The replicated Orion ERP database consists of 150Gb of data and is growing by around 10Gb per month, including over 12,000 monthly invoicing transactions.

Dbvisit Standby is a great tool to use. Configuration was simple and straightforward, and it makes even complex restore processing seamless. Standby’s automation of operational tasks reduces our commercial and technical risk and saves my team precious time and resources.

Pritesh Singadia CIO Hotpoint

The positive outcome

Standby™ was simple to install and is easily maintained by Hotpoint staff. Hotpoint’s CIO, Pritesh Singadia, calls out this benefit: “Dbvisit Standby is a great tool to use. Configuration was simple and straightforward, and it makes even complex restore processing seamless. Standby’s automation of operational tasks reduces our commercial and technical risk and saves my team precious time and resources”.

The new standby solution meets Hotpoint’s requirements for fast recovery and minimal data loss. It delivers near real-time replication of Hotpoint’s primary Oracle SE database to a warm standby server. In the event of a power outage or hardware failure Hotpoint can failover to the standby at any time with minimal data loss. Since installed, the solution regularly achieves a recovery time of less than 15 minutes with almost zero data loss.

Business continuity/disaster recovery tests are run quarterly to ensure successful recovery will be achieved in the case of a real outage. These tests are run from Standby™ and can be performed without any impact on the production system.

Tags: Case Study, Oracle SE, Retail, Minimal Data Loss, Easy DR Testing, Fast implementation, ERP

Achieved near zero data loss

In summary

Hotpoint is a large multi-national retailer and wholesaler of appliances.
Hotpoint and Sybl chose Standby™ due to its compatibility with Oracle Standard Edition, resilience against disasters, minimal data loss, fast recovery and ease of use.
Since deploying Standby™, Hotpoint has achieved recovery times of less than 15 minutes with almost zero data loss.