Cafod has chosen a solution from Plan B Disaster Recovery to improve data recovery times in its new offices in south London.

Previously the charity had two south London offices, with each one employing Data Domain backup systems, but found that in the event of a major outage there would be a lengthy manual rebuild and recovery process.

Under the new provisions, Plan B replicates the 12 servers in Cafod’s new office complex by taking snapshots of the network which are transferred to a data centre.

Once there, these newly created rescue images are reconfigured to run in a virtual environment as fully functioning systems, and are automatically updated every night and tested to ensure they can be booted immediately if Cafod’s live systems go down.

As a result recovery times are guaranteed to be within an agreed number of minutes.

Paul Hayward, infrastructure manager at Cafod, said: “Plan B have provided us with an easy to use DR system that keeps working in the background - requiring almost no management from us.”