After thorough evaluation, Haven enlisted Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner Smart421, now AWS Premier consulting partner KCOM, for advice, and decided to use AWS to build its business continuity and DR solution. “We sent the tenders out in January and February, and by April, we had started moving our disaster recovery to the cloud,” says Paul Armstrong, Haven Power Business Systems Manager. “Having a robust DR plan in place was important to us as a company, and we needed to do it quickly and as cost-effectively as possible. The natural choice for us was to leverage AWS durable and secure global infrastructure for a comprehensive disaster recovery environment.”

Haven and KCOM built a replica its infrastructure and launched it in the AWS Cloud. For this, Haven Power has Oracle and SQL Server databases, Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange, Windows file shares and other Amazon Machine Images hosted in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) in three Availability Zones in the EU (Ireland) Region in Dublin, ready to go at a moment’s notice should disaster strike. “Having replicas of its production environment offsite gives us the confidence that should a natural disaster strike, our data will remain safe,” Armstrong says. In addition to this, the company also uses

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) as an intermediate store. Amazon Glacier is used for production database backups.

Haven’s use of AWS expanded from there. The company was using an on-premise billing solution for bills of an annual turnover greater than £750 million. With infrastructure that was approaching five years old, the on-premise solution was nearing the end of its life. “We would have had to go through a significant and costly upgrade to get the system where we wanted it,” Armstrong says. In late 2013, Haven decided to migrate its billing system, a mission-critical workload, to production on AWS. The company built its billing application on

AWS CloudFormation and set up the network using AWS DirectConnect. The migration was successful, and the company has migrated its SQL Server-based data warehouse to AWS. The final solution connected Haven on premise to three AWS Availability Zones (AZs) across 2 Virtual Private Clouds (VPC). One VPC was retained for Business Continuity in a separate AZ and the other VPC was created across 2 AZs to provide automatic failover.

For storage, Haven uses Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS (SSD), provisioning 4,000 PIOPS disks across multiple volumes. Amazon Route 53 is used for DNS, and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is used for notification services.

To manage its infrastructure, the company uses KCOM's SmartSentinel, an AWS Resource Management tool using AWS APIs, and Amazon SNS for scheduling snapshots and uptime. Configuration of the environment is managed by AWS CloudFormation templates.