Bonhams Auction House drops the hammer on downtime

Bonhams Auction House has been selling thousands of priceless antiques all over the world for more than 200 years, achieving record-breaking prices for Keats’ original manuscripts and recently selling the most expensive car in history, Fangio’s Mercedes for $29,650,095. With action houses in London, Paris, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, operating 24/7 is a key part of its success. However, to do this mission critical activity and ensure that it remains operational should a disaster occur, the organisation needed to update its IT systems within two of its US data centres.
However, as with so many other medium-sized enterprises, the cost of achieving minimal downtime through traditional IT models and data protection strategies was becoming unaffordable. Bonhams turned to its partner Quru, a UK-based IBM Partner, to help it resolve the issue by developing and delivering a cost-effective, open-source approach with a reliable data protection solution from Acronis for its backup.

“We migrated Bonhams over to open source software for the foundation of the upgrade and to standardise diverse platforms. This dramatically reduced licensing costs and enabled new disaster recover capabilities that would have been prohibitively expensive on proprietary systems,” said Roland Whitehead, CEO of Quru. “By moving to an open source system based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation, with KVM technology, Bonhams was able to reduce the number of servers required by 75 percent from 35 to 8. The solution would have been 40 percent more expensive had Bonhams used a VMware-based approach, based on licensing costs and ongoing support.”

In order to maintain the integrity and availability of real-time transactional data the Auction House also needed to improve disaster recovery measures for the data centres based in New York and San Francisco. Acronis Backup & Recovery® was chosen to support these new systems and machines that Bonhams relies on daily.

“We have limited technical staff in the U.S., so we needed something that could be managed from another location,” said Simon Chiu, Bonhams’ senior systems engineer in San Francisco. “Using Acronis, we are able to take live snapshots of our virtual machines and back them up at either site and synchronise those backup files to each data centre. So, in the event of a catastrophic failure at either site, we can quickly restore the virtual machine from the most recent backup, and all services will b e up and running within hours instead of days.”

“Without these open source solutions, Bonhams would never have been able to implement a disaster recovery system,” said Roland Whitehead, CEO of Quru. “The open source system has provided a cost effective and robust computing platform for Bonhams, at a price that the organisation – and many other companies – can afford.”

“We have built a platform that works seamlessly across Linux-based virtual environments and provides multiple targets – tape, disk and cloud. Our close development relationships with IBM and Red Hat have been pivotal in helping customers like Bonhams achieve such impressive efficiencies,” said Dmitri Joukovski, senior vice president, product management, Acronis.

Specs and details:
· To add efficiency and stability to its operations, Bonhams consolidated 34 servers in its New York and San Francisco offices down to eight IBM System x3650 class servers. These servers are used as virtualisation hosts in a Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation version 3.1 cluster—enabling secure remote management of IT assets and full support for a worldwide disaster-recovery strategy. The servers run Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation Hypervisor, and the infrastructure is managed by just two Red Hat Enterp rise Virtualisation Managers running on dedicated IBM System x3550 servers, one in each location.

· Bonham’s is able to perform seamless backups of its virtualised environment with the use of Acronis Backup & Recovery Virtual Edition to back up the IBM servers at each site and replicate the backup data to the other locations.