ACS, a division of Altron and a provider of secure electronic transaction solutions, has implemented VMware Cloud Director and VMware Cloud Availability for a failproof cloud-hosted disaster recovery (DR) environment for the business and its clients.

Established in 1993, ACS provides select vertical markets with the provision of electronic transaction solutions across Africa and is supported by a rich portfolio of quality services and products. The company delivers its services to customers via a secure cloud environment from its head office in Sandton.

Running the cloud provisioning and management platform vCloud Director and integrating it directly into the VMware vCloud Director platform of Routed, a local Cloud Service Provider (CSP) on the VMware Cloud Provider Programme, ACS can now provision virtual machines to host its DR environment.

Replication of the environment is done to the Routed systems hourly and every machine that is replicated has its own managed firewalls within the Routed system. The entire service can be brought back in just two hours.

“The workloads we run are massive. We can’t just take it to one of the big hyperscalers as the costs would just be crippling,” says Mira Andric, manager: operations and delivery at ACS. “People also forget that when it comes to the cloud, you must manage, deploy, and run your own security.

“Routed provides the infrastructure and a self-managed portal that our engineers can log in to for full visibility. We also have direct access to their senior engineers, and the system interoperability between their VMware vCloud Director and our VMware vCloud Director is completely seamless.

“Our goal is to ensure systems perform accurately and efficiently with no system down time. We honour our commitment to our customers and strive to provide them with the best possible service and give them peace of mind where data security comes into play.”

The vCloud Availability Disaster Recovery solution on the Routed side allows for the replication of ACS’ virtual machines and full integration of the vCloud Director environments on both sides. A vSphere replication appliance replicates into the Routed vSphere system and self-service capabilities are passed back to the client through vCloud Director.

The system is also hardware-agnostic, so ACS is no longer locked into buying the same storage devices and hardware at each refresh cycle.

“The biggest benefit to us is that we have a partner, in Routed, looking at implementing a common layer of storage for storage replication and are open to collaborating with us on all of our future systems,” concludes Andric.