The challenge: In the event of an unplanned outage, Arch Chemicals needed to significantly reduce downtime for its tightly integrated enterprise system.
SunGard solution: Automatically relay changes in Arch's configuration to SunGard's facility, cutting potential downtime in half.
Arch Chemicals, Inc is a global specialty chemicals company, based in Connecticut, with annual sales of more than $1 billion, manufacturing plants on five continents, and 3 500 users on its network.
In the aftermath of 9/11, the chemical industry, and Arch Chemicals in particular, made a significant attempt to upgrade security, especially IT security.
"We had a security initiative - how to secure our perimeters, how to secure ourselves from internal attacks, and how to recover if something bad happened," says Al Schmidt, Arch CIO. "Part of that initiative involved making sure that every department in the company had a plan for recovery, and that all of our plans were current and under tight change control."
Schmidt wanted Arch to be a pacesetter in implementing the American Chemistry Council's aggressive new Security Code, which covers both physical and cyber security. He also understood that Arch's new cyber security measures must exemplify operational excellence, ensuring better availability of Arch's mission-critical systems.
First steps
"We performed a formal risk impact analysis to determine what would happen if our systems went down," says Schmidt. "What we found was that we had to have our systems back up within 48 hours. But we also found that because of the growth of our systems, we would've had a hard time meeting that 48-hour target."
Part of the problem was an approximately six-hour dead space between the time Arch's systems might go down and the time it could deliver backup tapes to a recovery site.
Schmidt wanted to find a way to use those six hours to reduce the recovery time.
"We brought in a number of vendors and asked what it would take to reach a 48-hour recovery window," recalls Schmidt. "Some suggested an automatic failover, but that wasn't within our budget. And there were other approaches that included archiving the data. We were looking for something in between - something that would get us back up in 24-48 hours and would be within our budget." Then Schmidt met with SunGard.
A custom solution
Drawing from an extensive portfolio, SunGard proposed a solution that integrated traditional recovery with SilhouetteSM software to jump-start the process. Silhouette resides on both the user's system and at SunGard's facility, automatically relaying changes in the user's configuration (eg, operating systems, applications), and facilitating a more reliable, expedited recovery process.
"With a product like Silhouette, we'd be able to build and restore and configure the servers at SunGard so that when our data arrived, we could start the recovery," says Arch's Schmidt.
There was one hitch, however. Arch runs its tightly integrated enterprise system on an HP platform, and Silhouette wasn't available on HP.
Being vendor-independent, SunGard's solution was to make Arch a beta platform for an HP version of Silhouette. Thus began a project that brought together Arch, SunGard, and the South Africa-based programmers of Indigo Stone International.
The results went well beyond the original goal.
"Through working with SunGard and other strategic vendors, we probably cut our restore time in half," says Schmidt. "Previously, it took us well over 48 hours to restore our entire database, but this effort helped us bring down our restore time to just 18-20 hours."
Arch has approximately 60% of its business tied into its enterprise system and plans to bring the remaining 40% into the fold over next few years.
The heavy reliance on this system means that any down time is felt throughout the organisation. And that's simply not compatible with Arch's business objectives.
"We take the security and availability of our systems very seriously - the two issues are closely linked," says Arch CEO Michael Campbell.
Campbell is also Chairman of the Executive Committee of the American Chemistry Council, which consults with the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defence and the FBI, among others, to develop effective security measures for the US chemical industry.
"SunGard's ability to help us ensure maximum availability for our mission-critical systems is an integral part of achieving our security objectives."
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