Publisher puts faith in new system
By Leslie Faughnan
The doyen of Irish publishing is Gill & Macmillan, which can trace its origins to 1856. Now a successful educational and general publisher, the company has 70 staff at its head office in Dublin’s Park West.
“A publishing company is essentially information based, and we have more than two terabytes of data, growing at perhaps 15 per cent or more every year,” said Gill &Macmillan chief information officer Vincent Hunt.” As well as book text, editions and so on, there is a large library of illustrations and graphics.” Backup and disaster recovery were the worrying issues that led the company to consult CD soft.
During that process, the logic of going to a virtualised infrastructure became apparent very quickly. Gill & Macmillan now has a fully fault tolerant system with its Microsoft HyperV and DPM[data protection manager] ensuring real-time replication of critical system on its own San and the CD soft data centre in Bracetown, Co Dublin.
“We were always conscientious about our DR and, in the past, we allocated two to three days annually for testing everything thoroughly,” said Hunt.
“Now we can recover everything, even all of the archives, in about six hours. That is the business, literally, so it’s very reassuring. If a single server failed we could get it back up in about 20 minutes.”
