When anyone has an Apollo 13 moment, they need a team on the ground that knows what it’s doing – or at least have the collective brain power to figure out a solution if one hasn’t been invented yet.
The crew on Apollo 13 had a power supply problem after oxygen, required for its fuel cells, started venting into space. That disaster led to a litany of other issues, all resolved by a dedicated team of space nerds, eager to flex the power of their slide rules and duct tape imaginings.
One morning, the team at Arthur Burke had their own Apollo 13 issue, but they didn’t get on the phone to Houston, instead they called BTG.
Arthur Burke’s General Manager, Craig Schroder, said everything came to a halt across the company when the server died. BTG’s monitoring system also lit up with warnings when the server’s status changed.
Craig explains that replacing the on-premises server would have come at a significant cost: “It would have taken a week. While waiting for that, we’d be writing everything on paper the whole time without an ability to even send out an invoice. And then there would be the catch up.”
Fortunately, all data up to the previous evening was backed up and, also, BTG had another idea, which was to switch Arthur Burke from an on-premises server strategy into the cloud.
DELIVERY
BTG Senior Support Engineer Ryan Cox, based in Christchurch, was on the job quickly alongside other members of his team.
“To get things up and running quickly, we provided an option to migrate everything from the back-up on to our cloud platform,” Ryan said.
“Once it was clear the server was never coming back, the client made the decision to move to the cloud and we started to work on getting everything across and recreating the environment for the team.”
The flexibility of BTG’s cloud resources also enabled Arthur Burke to take up the opportunity to upgrade to a newer version of Autoline.
The failure of the server occurred mid-morning and by the start of the next day, the team was working in the new cloud-based environment.
Craig explained that he had considered moving to the cloud at some point, but when the server failed with no option to replace quickly, it was clear that now was the time to move.
“I don’t think Ryan got a lot of sleep during that week, ensuring all the final tweaks and niggles were taken care of.”
