Critical Server Recovery during IPO

NexGen Financial Limited Partnership is an independent financial services firm that develops value added investment solutions for financial advisors and their clients. NexGen focuses on the creation of innovative investment products and services that meet the needs of Canadians seeking more tax efficient investment opportunities and greater control over the tax treatment of their investments.

Situation

Managed by strong investment professionals, NexGen sought a technology service company who possessed strong skill sets and staff who could offer reliable advice.

Unfortunately, on March 21, 2007 – the day of NexGen’s initial public offering – their server crashed.

Stretched on resources and a surplus of users, the server failed. This failure landed NexGen in an uncomfortable situation as communicating data with clients and employees was impossible.

Solution

Reactive: Restore Server

• A restore for NexGen’s server was attempted, but the renewal software for the server was not immediately available.
• While procuring new software, we moved a backup server onsite which would function as a temporary server to restore business productivity.
• Quartet backup tapes were used to restore a secondary computer as a file server so that employees had sufficient data to continue business-as-usual.
• Our diagnostics discovered a solution that allowed redeployment of the existing server.

Long-Term: New Infrastructure Design & Media Library

• Re-designed NexGen infrastructure to segment the key IT functions onto 2+ servers.
  This initiative mitigated any risk of the server slowing to a crawl.
• Created application redundancy wherever possible.
  With failover systems in play, NexGen could be certain that network crashes would be solved seamlessly.
• Ensure all required media is on-site.
  With an adequate technology inventory, Quartet could ensure SLAs were met and NexGen was functioning at peak-performance levels.

Results

“As a startup company, we did what most small businesses do and bought a small-business-server in order to get the ball rolling. Time progressed, staff continued to multiply, and our resources became clearly stretched.

During an initial infrastructure migration project, Quartet was able to reutilize some of our existing technology and maintain reasonably cost-effective support. The net result has been we are very happy with a scalable platform that ultimately allows for growth. Being a fund manager means we deal with the public’s money. This dictates a need for zero-downtime. Quartet is responsive to those needs with personnel who actually know what they are doing.

We are currently experiencing a depth of talent we had never witnessed previously.”

-Laurie Munro, President, NexGen Financial Limited Partnership