Centurum Embarks on Zero Downtime Mission with Continuity Engine

At times of war and of peace, the Department of Defense and other federal government agencies often rely on the expertise of outside providers to ensure that information technology critical to the security of the nation, is always in working order.

Centurum, Inc. is one of these IT providers. The company is at the center of multiple federal government agencies’ efforts to build and deploy effective worldwide wired and wireless Netcentric communications solutions. The government’s Netcentric initiative is a continuously-evolving, complex community of people, devices, information and services interconnected by a communications network designed to achieve optimal benefit of resources and better synchronization of events.

With offices in Charleston S.C., Wash-ington D.C., Norfolk, Va., Tampa, Fla. and San Diego, Calif., Centurum employees are never far from the organizations they serve – various federal government department and agency headquarters, the Department of Defense Echelon II and III Com-manders and Department of the Navy fleet concentration areas.

In 2004, Centurum was created from the merger of three commonly-owned, affiliated companies. Now under one corporate umbrella, these companies each exist as separate business units: Centurum Technical Solutions, Centurum Information Technology and Centurum Infor-mation Operations. Bringing the companies together with disparate systems in place and unifying them was a challenge for the Centurum IT team whose obligation was to ensure that all systems operated at full capacity without a moment’s pause.

Removing Luck from the Equation

As part of the overall technology plan for the newly formed entity, Centurum’s IT department was chartered with a company wide migration. After an audit of the data center and systems, the department also decided it was time to put a disaster recovery solution in place to protect Centurum’s valuable applications and data and to protect the communication flow that is critical to its clients. Centurum provides information technology to a wide spectrum of Department of Defense and other federal government agencies’ mission-critical network and communications requirements and downtime is not an option.

Working together, the IT team began the evaluation process; they were searching for a solution that supported WAN-based disaster recovery over T1 lines to keep costs down. A strong vendor relationship with Microsoft also was important, as well as a laundry list of features to ensure availability.

Centurum evaluated several products and was impressed with the Neverfail solutions. Ultimately, Neverfail for Microsoft® Exchange won the evaluation process and Centurum implemented it to protect its email server environments that are so important for constant communication. Centurum also selected Neverfail for Microsoft® SQL Server to protect its rapidly evolving network of databases.

Failure is Not an Option

Given the sensitivity of Centurum’s business, Golden and his team decided to tackle the implementation themselves rather than hiring an outside integrator.

Shortly after implementation, Neverfail was put to the test when Centurum experienced a power outage. Within seconds, Golden and his team were able to failover to the secondary system in Virginia and ensure business continuity.

And there was zero loss of data. The servers were synched up immediately ensuring continuity of all communications with no loss of email or related data.