Bonhams auction house, a British-based international organization that has sold thousands of priceless antiques worldwide for more than 200 years, has been able to cut the total number of servers in its New York and San Francisco locations from 35 to 8 while creating a virtual machine backup and DR system between the two locations. By choosing an Open Source system using Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization running on IBM System x3650 class servers, it saved 40% over using VMware. Its new Acronis data protection in a solution running on top of this system allows it to backup VMs between the sites, providing a modern DR solution at a reasonable price, with adquate recovery time.

Bonhams, with auction houses in London, Paris, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, has achieved record-breaking prices for Keats’s original manuscripts and recently sold the most expensive car in history, Fangio’s Mercedes Formula 1 race car, (see photo above) for $29,650,095. To support its 24/7 operations and ensure its ability to survive a regional disaster, it needed to update its IT systems in its New York and Los Angeles offices. As part of that, it wanted to create a mutual backup system copying VMs between the two locations.

However, the cost of achieving minimal downtime through traditional IT models and data protection strategies was becoming unaffordable. It asked its partner Quru, a U.K.-base IBM business Partner, for help.

“We migrated Bonhams over to Open Source for the foundation of the upgrade and to standardize diverse platforms. This dramataically reduced licensing costs and enabled new disaster recovery capabilities that would have been prohibitively expensive on proprietary systems,” said Roland Whitehead, Quru CEO. The Red Hat solution using KVM technology allowed Bonhams to reduce the number of servers it needed at the two sites 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.”

To protect the integrity and availability of real-time transactional data, Bonhams also needed to improve disaster recovery for its New Hork and san Francisco data centers. It chose Acronis Backup & Recovery for this.

“We have limited technical staff in the U.S., so we needed something that could be managed from another location,” Simon Chui, Bonhams’ senior systems engineer in San Francisco, said. “Using Acronis, we were able to take live snapshots of our virtual machines and back them up at either site and synchronize those backup files to each data center. 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 be up and running within hours instead of days.”