When Hamilton Associates experienced a catastrophic failure to its storage array
on a late Friday night, R3 worked through the night and the weekend to successfully
migrate the client to Azure Active Directory in just three days.
Our on-prem system crashed on a Friday evening and by Tuesday R3 was able to migrate everything into Azure and get us up and running as if it never happened. The ability to only lose 2 business days of daily operations was invaluable to our business.
Burak Ozsarac, IT Manager
Summary
On a late Friday night, R3 received several alerts regarding failed servers to one of its clients, Hamilton Associates. Upon further investigation, it was determined that there was a catastrophic failure on their storage array. R3 worked through the night and into the weekend on recovery efforts. Due to the nature of the failure, it was determined that recovery efforts of the Active Directory environment would extend far into the next week, impacting business operations.
R3 immediately began a lift-n-shift of critical applications and database servers to Azure. Removal from existing domain for servers in Azure and re-join to Azure Active Directory Domain Services. Greenfield build of Azure Virtual Desktop to replace traditional RDS environment. Workstation fleet (120 workstations) removed from existing domain and joined Azure Active Directory.
Primary Stats
- No data lost
- 120 workstations migrated to Azure
- 12 hour AVD environment build
- Only 2 business days lost
The Problem
Without Active Directory in a fully functioning state, users would have difficulties logging into and accessing most business critical applications. This would have not only affected users in the client’s US offices, but also those in the UK offices as well. Much of the client’s production would have been at a standstill without access to these critical platforms, impacting the client’s revenue and customer image from being hindered from getting their customers’ orders fulfilled timely.
The Solution
R3 engaged its IT Continuity team to begin recovery efforts on Saturday to attempt to restore the environment to its original state. It was quickly determined that a full recovery of the environment was required.
Due to the heavy workloads of the terminal server environment, it was determined by R3’s Implementation team that a like-for-like environment in Azure would not be cost effective. Instead, R3 decided to implement Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), alongside Azure Active Directory Domain Services (AADDS) to reduce monthly costs while enhancing the overall security of the environment with the features within AVD.
While R3’s Implementation team was building the new AVD environment, the IT Continuity team began restoring the client’s existing servers to Azure using Azure Site Recovery (ASR). The replicas of the servers captured by ASR allowed for exact copies of the servers to exist in Azure, reducing the need for the underlying OS and applications to be completely reconfigured.
In tandem with these operations, R3’s Endpoint Management team began building customized scripts to facilitate removing the workstations from the old domain and joining to Azure Active Directory (AAD). These scripts were presented to the end-users as applications in Intune’s Company Portal that the user could run to have the procedure completed at their convenience. The procedure took approximately 20-30 minutes to complete.
Finally, R3 configured and deployed Azure Universal Print to serve as the print management solution for the client’s 20-30 printers in each of their office buildings.
By taking infrastructure management and maintenance off your hands, MSPs can provide you with more time to focus on the more important aspects of your business, including revenue-generating opportunities and resource optimization. MSPs’ proactive approach can also help you avoid downtime, thereby improving your team’s availability and performance.
The Results
The AVD environment was built in under 12 hours and included approximately 15 applications as part of a standard image. The development of the AVD environment introduced an additional layer of redundancy by adding additional hosts for end users to connect. The client’s previous RDS environment was inefficient which resulted in frequent support calls to troubleshoot issues due to the age of the hosts – this was all removed with the introduction of AVD. R3 also configured the new environment to auto-scale, depending on user activity to reduce costs.
120 workstations were removed from the old domain and seamlessly joined to Azure Active Directory with minimal impact to the end users. This was completed on all workstations in 1 week without needing to dispatch engineers to carry out this task and it was completely automated.
There was absolutely NO data loss from this entire event and critical operations were unaffected because of R3’s quick response and precise execution.
