Neverfail protects critical communications infrastructure against downtime to ensure processes are continuously available for prestigious sporting events

Fast Track is an internationally renowned sports marketing agency working in tandem with large UK sporting and athletics clients. The company has an unrivalled reputation for delivering impactful and measurable events, both in the UK and across International territories.

In May 2012, a series of events is set to take place, including the BT Paralympics World Cup and the Sainsbury’s 2012 School Games. These events will demand meticulous levels of organization and planning from Fast Track’s IT team to ensure the necessary technology is in place to guarantee the business delivers on the day and does not fall at the last hurdle.

Fast Track’s communications infrastructure underpins all daily routines and interactions with third-party suppliers, designers, health and safety officers and contractors. Without uninterrupted connectivity that fuels interactions with these partners, events can be severely jeopardised – particularly when broadcast live.

The “May Mission”

Fast Track and its partners face a huge task when helping to organise several televised sporting showcases.  Ahead of the events in May this year, the “May Mission” will begin.  This involves close collaboration between IT, internal marketing and external teams to firm-up all groundwork and back-office procedures to ensure everything goes to plan.

2-3 months in advance: First out of the starting block is a job for the IT team.  All data entered into what is termed the “results system” needs to be checked and double checked. This is essentially a large network of databases and spreadsheets which frame start lists, events and athletes schedules. Once these fundamentals are ironed out, third-party contractors, health and safety officers and PR teams can begin their work to produce and promote each event accordingly. This entails a lot of back-and-forth between each team to determine roles and responsibilities, covering all bases and pre-empting last minute changes.  Fast Track’s communication arsenal is central to ensuring all global contracts are signed, plans drawn up and documents exchanged on an ongoing basis. All parties are operating to strict deadlines in the run up to these high-profile events and cannot afford a breakdown in critical communications infrastructure. This is particularly crucial as over 70% of Fast Track’s workforce relies on BlackBerry devices to communicate from various global locations.

14 days to go: The IT team is tasked with determining the specific IT equipment needed on-site which can include the necessary broadband cables, printers and desktops which form the communications hub that employees and partners use to exchange emails on-site and when making last-minute preparations.

Magnus Leask, Head of IT at Fast Track explains “The sheer number of conversations that the IT team and marketing departments have prior to these events is extortionate, and if we did not have our Microsoft Exchange and BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) applications running continuously we would be dead in the water.”

7 days to go: Fast Track’s IT team then has to conduct due diligence on its business continuity plan to ensure that, in the event of a disaster or service interruption, critical processes will continue to operate without a hitch.  If anything does go wrong during a live event, future contracts could be jeopardised, together with negative impact to business reputation and significant hits to the balance sheet.  Projects of this scale require services which build resilience into Fast Track’s infrastructure, counteracting any communication problems that can result from power outages, natural disasters and hardware failure.

Neverfail Receives a Gold Medal

Fast Track deployed Neverfail technology to protect its critical communications applications against downtime back in 2007. Neverfail maintains a clone of the email and BlackBerry servers on a VMware server at the disaster recovery site. Given the emphasis Fast Track places on round-the-clock availability, the technology is at the core of all operations.  Fast Track’s primary data centre is located in its London headquarters, while its disaster recovery site is housed in Maidenhead.  During live broadcasts, in the event that downtime occurs due to hardware failure, power outage or natural disaster, Neverfail seamlessly fails over the email and BlackBerry servers to the secondary location.

The significance of testing and implementing this failover process came into full force when power outages in Central London in July 2010 resulted in the automatic failover of the Microsoft Exchange and BES environments to the DR site. This power cut clashed with the Aviva UK Athletics London Grand Prix which was being broadcast live on the BBC at the time. With Neverfail, operations were automatically failed over for the duration of the event and critical IT ran from the secondary location instead of the primary headquarters.  Because Fast Track had conducted frequent DR tests, this outage did not curb communications when used “in anger” and employees were able to continue their work on the ground without any problems.

The Verdict

“Without Neverfail technology in the lead-up to and during these events, we would be in trouble. Neverfail just works when we need it to and is a strategic partner to our business,” says Magnus Leask. “Back in 2010 during the Grand Prix, its exemplary performance in guaranteeing our critical applications remained operational from the DR site was admirable and the solution definitely proved its worth in delivering exceptional ROI for the business.”

“The month of May will be a busy one for us, and the IT team will be under a lot of pressure to deliver.  Neverfail is an invaluable crutch to lean on if anything were to go wrong once we are in the thick of it. This provides us with a deep assurance that all our hard work will not go to waste and the business will continue to thrive in high pressure situations.”

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The preceding case study can be found in its original format here.