Irvine, CA-based LPS Default Title & Closing, a division of Lender Processing Services (LPS), expedites the default title and closing process for its clients. The company runs a 24/7 business and serves clients around the world. As a result, it can’t afford downtime with any of its applications.
The company staffs an operations center with system administrators from 6AM to midnight. If there were any Website outages or other application issues overnight (between midnight and 6AM), administrators would be bombarded with problems in the morning.
In order to improve the 24/7 availability of its critical applications, LPS Default considered adding an overnight administrator to the team, but decided to first explore technology options. It ended up pursuing a cloud-based disaster recovery service that it rolled out in stages, starting with the company’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
LPS first deployed solutions from Neverfail for its BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) to protect 60 handsets for the company’s executives and staff who rely on their wireless devices to get their work done, including those in management, facilities, human resources and development, and IT.
"We selected Neverfail because it would provide us with a high availability solution that protects our organization against application and system issues," says Carlos Albor, LPS Default’s systems support manager.
The company’s SQL servers were next on the list. "Once we ensured high availability for our BlackBerry users, we determined that we needed to protect access to the business-critical data that we store on our SQL services," says Albor.
Since SQL servers host 16 different databases powering a wide variety of internal and external Web applications, downtime would be extremely costly. LPS estimates that one hour of downtime would cost the company about $1 million in lost productivity and problems with customers being unable to access the system. "We are expanding our use to include the Neverfail Messaging Systems bundle that includes SQL servers," he says.
LPS also uses Neverfail for planned downtime, since the solution is able to keep the company’s applications always available. "Because Neverfail is automated, we don’t always have to be in the office to ensure that everything is up and running," says Albor. "The notifications that Neverfail provides tell us when something doesn’t look right, and we can then engage to fix any issues. This means that we don’t have to have employees dedicated to disaster recovery. They can just deal with issues as they come up."
As a result of the introduction of Neverfail, the decided it didn’t need to hire that overnight systems administrator after all, resulting in an additional saving of about $150,000 per year in employee compensation.
The company has suffered a few local outages since implementing Neverfail. However, Albor says the technology responded so seamlessly that he wasn’t even aware that the outtages had occurred until he received automatic notifications from Neverfail.
The next step? "We are in the process of becoming more of a disaster recovery-ready type of company," he says. "As we start to rearchitect our WAN infrastructure to send data to our corporate headquarters, we expect to roll out a comprehensive disaster recovery solution — one that expands our use of Neverfail to enable continuous availability of our applications and critical systems."
