Disaster Recovery for Tayto

Set deep in the heart of the Ulster countryside in Tandragee is Tayto Castle where Tayto crisps and snacks have been made for the past 60 years. A ‘Taste of Home’, Tayto products have been a big part of growing up in Northern Ireland.

 

Established in 1956 and still owned by the same family – the Hutchinsons, Tayto pride themselves in employing local people and using local ingredients and materials to produce great tasting crisps and snacks for everyone to enjoy.

The Challenge

Tayto is a full time 24×7 production environment, and as such the risk and loss to the business associated with unscheduled IT downtime is not an option.

 

As part of their Risk Assessment Process when carrying out a natural refresh of their primary infrastructure, it was determined that the risk of an application or hardware failure bringing factory production to a halt was currently unacceptable.

 

Tayto needed to implement a solution that would help alleviate this risk and which would provide reassurance that, should disaster strike, their IT solutions were resilient and could be recovered without significant loss to the business.

The Solution

Having worked closely with Tayto for over 15 years, we already had a deep understanding of the Tayto network and infrastructure. We were aware that Tayto’s ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system and Exchange, based at the company’s Tandragee headquarters, were vital to continuous production. To ensure the highest levels of protection for these mission critical systems Telefónica Tech established a dispersed Disaster Recovery (DR) site utilising Zerto for disaster recovery and replication.

 

Zerto virtual replication is a powerful disaster recovery solution for virtualised infrastructures that includes replication, recovery orchestration and automation. This means that should Tayto need to activate their disaster recovery procedures, they can recover one, all or a subset of their virtualised applications from their storage.

 

Tayto had also implemented a full MPLS (multiprotocol label switching) with hosted firewall which facilitates and enhances their disaster recovery operation.

 

This solution ensures that the company’s production can continue to operate in the event of the failure of any of their hardware or applications. As a company with around £200 million turnover, every hour of business lost to IT downtime could potentially cost over £22,000. Working with Zerto for disaster recovery gives Tayto an actual RTO (Recovery Time Objective) of 120 seconds on their ERP server, so that potential loss never becomes a reality

  • “

    The expertise of the team have been invaluable to us as a business for many years. IT is crucial to the functioning of our operations which produce millions of products each year, and this disaster recovery investment allows us to continue to enhance our business.

    Christopher Milligan

    Group Systems & Infrastructure Manager, Tayto

The Conclusion

Tayto now protect over 35 virtual machines with Zerto. This gives Tayto the confidence that they will be able to recover quickly should any unforeseen events occur in the future.

 

The ability to test regularly and provide detailed reports on their virtual environment also means that Tayto is quickly and accurately able to prove successful failover within their test environment.

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