National Natural Gas System Operator DESFA S.A.: Disaster Recovery on Azure

Customer: National Natural Gas System Operator DESFA S.A.

Country: Greece

Industry: Energy

Organization Size: Large

Products & Services: Azure IaaS, Azure Site Recovery, SQL Server, SharePoint Server

Customer Profile

The National Natural Gas System Operator (DESFA) S.A. is responsible for the operation, management, exploitation and development of the National Natural Gas System and its interconnections, in a technically sound and economically efficient way, in order to best serve its Users with safety, reliability and adequacy.

Possessing extensive experience and having a highly skilled staff, DESFA is a reliable partner in the framework of the ongoing international energy projects in Southeastern Europe.

Situation

Having a Disaster Recovery plan in an organization is one of the most critical points in ensuring the continuity of business operations. DESFA’s choice to implement the Disaster Recovery Site on Microsoft Azure has given the advantage of the most up-to-date and innovative technologies available now.

Solution

DESFA’s IT Team called in Office Line S.A. who is 2019 Microsoft Country Partner of the Year for Greece and has great experience and exposure on Microsoft’s product and cloud service offerings.

To provide the National Natural Gas System Operator with the modern technologies on the Azure platform, it took several changes to give the on-premises infrastructure the form required to support these technologies.

The most important of these were:

1. Hyper-V Cluster Migration from 2012 OS to 2016 OS on main HQ Site
2. Upgrade All Virtual Machines configuration version on main HQ Site
3. Migrate all SQL Databases that hosted on SQL 2008R2 FCI to SQL 2016 Availability Groups at synchronous mode on main HQ Site
4. Migrate SharePoint 2013 to SharePoint 2016

For the disaster recovery implementation, Office Line’s solution architects used a combination of tools and processes. For the main workload migration, our team used Azure Site Recovery. For the Active Directory replication, we created an Active Directory Site on Azure with a Domain Controller in Azure IaaS and for the databases we used Azure SQL Always on Availability Groups with a secondary copy on Azure IaaS.

Finally, our experts performed a planned failover and failback scenario and provided DESFA with the proof of concept documentation and step-by-step guides.

Benefits

The main benefits for DESFA were:

1. The Azure Disaster Recovery service is the most cost effective, since the Virtual Machines on the DR site are not charged as long as they are not active. The service charges a standard fee per VM for the replication.
2. The data on Azure are saved in the most resilient storage system and are stored in three copies.
3. At any time, the customer can perform a test failover to an isolated environment and check the availability of the whole infrastructure or even test a bug in a development environment that is exactly like the production and get charged only for the time that the VMs are active.