The Royal Albert Hall has overhauled its approach to back up and DR, using Commvault for back up and Zerto for DR with Databarracks deploying its Resource Planner tool to assess The Royal Albert Hall’s infrastructure.

The iconic venue now operates a hybrid environment across the public cloud and an on-premises infrastructure. Critically, it is now able to recover and reconnect its ticketing systems with as little downtime as possible.

Crispin Gray, head of IT for The Royal Albert Hall, said: “It’s a fascinating place to work. From Cirque du Soleil, to Adele to The Proms, there are amazing things happening almost every day.”

As such a high profile venue, the organisation deals with numerous business continuity challenges. From a data and IT perspective, our top priorities are our ticketing systems. Some of the events we hold are phenomenally popular and sell out very quickly but there is always activity at any time of day. We need to make sure that we minimise any potential downtime to those systems and ensure that our data is protected at all times, with RPOs as short as possible.

“We wanted to enhance to our IT resilience. As an organisation, we need to meet an expectation for uptime, so our primary objective was to reduce our recovery times for key systems.”

Crispin said one of the additional benefits of the upgrade to systems and processes was the improvement in testing.

“We now test the solution on a bi-annual basis and the process has improved every time. We operate a hybrid environment across the public cloud and our on-premises infrastructure. A lot of our planning is centred around how we can recover and reconnect our ticketing systems quickly with as little downtime as possible.

“We love how easy it is to schedule a test without big additional expense. Testing in Azure has also been an easy way to become familiar with the platform and introduce it to the team here. On the people and process side, we appreciate the little things such as how Databarracks will use different engineers each time we test so knowledge isn’t siloed.”

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