Endsleigh takes active route to avoid disaster

Endsleigh goes active-active to avoid disaster

UK insurance provider Endsleigh Insurance has seen a significant rise in online business in recent years. To protect this increasingly important side to its operations the company has installed a new disaster recovery system.

Endsleigh opted for a dual high-speed 100Mbit/s National Ethernet circuit from ntl:Telewest Business. The circuit delivers managed internet services between Endsleigh’s Cheltenham headquarters and its principal disaster recovery site in Burnley – a distance of around 90 miles.

The firm’s infrastructure project manager, Jason Collins, explained that there were a couple of things driving the need for such a deployment. "Our web services resiliency was based on an active-passive model, rather than an active-active one," he said.

Active-passive sites mean that one site is processing requests while the passive one remains on standby. If the active site fails, the passive site is brought online and takes over processing duties.

Active-active sites mean that processing requests are split between the sites giving better availability if one site goes down, or encounters problems.

"When we spoke to ntl:Telewest Business about how to achieve this, we ended up with the highly resilient solution using dual circuits coming into the local Cheltenham site through dual firewalls," said Collins.

Losing a circuit or a firewall would cause an automatic “trip” between the two sites, meaning Endsleigh can deal with individual points of failure caused by a circuit or firewall falling down, without interruption to service.

One of the big issues for Endsleigh was getting the 100Mbit/s circuit between Cheltenham and Burnley set up. Collins said: "We approached a number of providers, including our incumbent provider BT, but they were unable to provide such a circuit. ntl:Telewest Business, on the other hand, could.”

The 100Mbit/s circuit is not fully utilised and currently uses about 15 per cent of its operational capacity.

The other factor driving the deployment, according to Collins, was the firm’s adoption of virtualisation. Over the past 18 months, Endsleigh has moved all its “pizza box” servers onto a platform that uses VMware ESX virtualisation technology.

With virtualised servers on each site, Endsleigh can quickly address increased transaction processing requests.
"It's all very well having the ability to switch from one site to another, but it’s also essential that you have the capacity to deal with 100 per cent of your business on both sites," said Collins.

In future, Endsleigh is looking to virtualise its desktop infrastructure as well. "We'll have a pilot running before the end of the year," said Collins.