GAIL commisions IT Disaster Recovery Centre

Gail India Ltd has announced that the Company on March 14, 2008 formally commissioned an IT Disaster Recovery Centre at Jaipur to ensure uninterrupted business operations in case of any eventuality.

The Disaster Recovery Centre at Jaipur will help GAIL mitigate the risks of potential disasters to its IT infrastructure whether from fire, earthquake, prolonged power outage, war, riot, flood, bombing, terrorist attacks, cyber attacks etc. which in turn will help GAIL to continue uninterrupted services and supply to its customers.

The Centre will help GAIL to achieve the zero data loss and restoration of business within 2-3 hours time in case of any eventuality. The three way Disaster Recovery Centre has been set up by GAIL with state-of-the-art infrastructure at a cost of Rs 15 crores.

Speaking on the occasion, Dr. U D Choubey, GAIL emphasized the importance of business continuity to retain the confidence of stakeholders in today's business environment and described the Disaster recovery setup at Jaipur as a major risk management initiative taken by GAIL. He further said that GAIL proposes to take the Disaster Recovery Plan beyond IT and ERP to include business operations too and to develop an organization-wide Business Continuity Strategy. He also emphasized the need for proper identification, planning and implementation to ensure not only Business Survival but also long term success particularly when GAIL is planning to double its pipeline infrastructure and aiming for almost a three fold increase in revenues from the current Rs 16,047 crore to Rs 50,000 crore by 2011-12 and expanding its major spheres of pipelines, petrochemicals and distribution business.

GAIL has set up the Data Recovery Centre at Jaipur considering factors such as different seismic zones (vis-a-vis existing Datacentre at Noida), proximity and connectivity to Delhi, probability of dangers such as flood, tsunami etc. and robust connectivity with GAIL's own telecom bandwidth. The Centre is equipped with all infrastructure required for such systems. The design engineering for the Data Recovery Centre has been carried out in-house and the job was executed by Wipro.

Initially, the Data Recovery for business critical SAP R/3 Systems have been covered. Subsequently, all critical applications like GMS, E-mail and Customer Relationship Management / SRM would be covered.

GAIL implemented SAP-ERP in 2005 to cover business functions like Marketing and Sales, Collections and Payments, Finance Operations, Material Management, Human Resource etc. The entire ERP infrastructure is hosted at GAIL's state-of-the-art datacenter at Noida. A low capacity standby ERP server is placed at a separate location to cater to the requirement for 200 critical users, in case of any contingency at the Primary datacenter at Noida.