When one of the founders of your company is known as the fatherof American insurance, it's probably a good idea to follow hisadvice—even if the advice is more than 260 years old.

We're talking about Benjamin Franklin and one of his famousthoughts is: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.“

The Philadelphia Contributionship, which Franklin helped foundin 1752, is listening to that advice by initiating a disasterrecovery and business continuity plan to keep the property insurerup and running in the event of a tragedy.

“We were hit pretty hard by Hurricane Irene (in 2011) like mostpersonal lines companies,” says Mark Montagna, IT infrastructuremanager for the Contributionship. “But this particularinitiative—from a standpoint of replication and high availabilitydisaster recovery—has been going on for a few years. It wasn'tactually brought on by Irene; Irene just underlined the need forit.”

The Contributionship had just one data center and Montagnaexplains, “We needed to get the data into another data center so wecould bear the brunt of a disaster occurring at ourheadquarters.”

Like many smaller carriers, the Contributionship is located inthe same geographic area as its policyholders as well as itsemployees.

“An event could affect the business and our policyholders,” saysMontagna. “We need to take care of our customers in their time ofneed to maintain continuity in the event of a disaster.”

When Montagna joined the Contributionship two years ago, hefound a company in transition with new leadership. He alsodiscovered the technology in place was not suitable for highavailability or business continuity. So, one of the first steps wasto begin the process of spreading the risk to an additional datacenter.

“We pushed some of our production systems, which were located atthe headquarters, to a remote data center, but there wasn't areplication scenario,” he said.

Montagna felt it was imperative to utilize the environment of aremote data center, but from a disaster perspective the company wassimply backing up data in the event of a disaster. From there theIT team would go to the recovery center and bring it backonline.

“It would require a minimum one to three days to accomplishthat,” he said. “Replication became the obvious candidate so wecould have our systems 'warm' versus coming from a 'cold' postureif something were to occur.”

The ability to replicate what is being processed on the serverswas unheard of for companies the size of the Contributionship15years ago, according to Montagna.

“Virtualization opened the doors to replication for us,” hesays. “To be able to replicate a virtualized server from onelocation to another utilizing older technology from our SANSallowed us to replicate entire volumes stored in there. Thatlowered our recovery time from 72 hours to whatever time it took tobuild the system around the warm data.”

Montagna claims he spent three months with little successfinding a software-based solution that was not snapshot based.Montagna was on the Internet trying to find other alternatives thatcould match up with the company, the network, and the resources ofthe Contributionship when he came across Zerto and its virtualreplication product.

“It was kind of a love story,” he says. “I didn't believe itwhen I saw it.”

Zerto is a young new company and Montagnaexplains the vendor had to prove itself all the way through theprocess.

“They were telling me they could do something and I could notfind anyone else who said they could do this,” he says. “There aresolutions providers who promise the world and you bite. You eithertake your losses, or you lick your wounds and move on.”

Fortunately, this wasn't the case for the Contributionship,which committed one tenth of its network to Zerto for a disasterrecovery exercise, something the insurer does twice a year.

“We picked some of the more critical back-end administrativesystems that our company requires to do business on a daily basis,”says Montagna. “We performed the tests and went through whatnormally takes 24 hours to get those servers online and did it in10 minutes. The reason it took 10 minutes was because we did themone at a time. We could have had them all online in oneminute.”

Zerto allows the Contributionship to scale in a test mode usingvirtualization, bring it online, test it, and conduct a proof ofconcept for the users, according to Montagna. All the while thattest is going on, replication continues.

“I still to this day don't know another company doing this,” hesays.

Work remains, but the Contributionship is moving full throttleto add the remaining environment. Zerto, meanwhile is addingfeatures and expanding on what they currently offer.

“We can also use this as a development source,” says Montagna.“Those replicas we copy across the network can stand up as a clonefor developers to step up and test applications to see if it worksand then destroy the clone.”

When a company has been in business for 260 years and listsBenjamin Franklin as one of its founders, there's a certain amountof pressure to keep the company successful.

Montagna puts it succinctly: “Don't screw it up on ourwatch.”