Dublin Pharmaceutical Rottapharm Madaus Chooses Savenet

Savenet Solutions Ltd, a Dublin based cloud storage and DR company, has completed a backup and BC solution for Rottapharm Madaus, a pharmaceutical company with a manufacturing site in Mulhuddart, Co Dublin.

Rottapharm’s Irish facility manufactures and sells drugs used in the treatment of anti-inflammatory, anti-rheumatic and gastro-intestinal disorders. Some of the brand names produced include, Dona, Plantaben, Tromalyt, Ananase and Extranase. It employs over 150 people at its Mulhuddart base.

Due to the global nature of Rottapharm’s business and the critical, sensitive product data that they are handling, the IT environment needs to be resilient to any kind of disaster as well as being secure. In addition, Rottapharm have to meet international auditing compliance standards.

Due to the increasing scale of the production at the site, the decision was made to migrate to a paperless quality control and electronic batch recording system. This meant that the legacy IT environment had to be overhauled to cope with data growth and management.

Any form of data loss would mean the production line stops – which would cost the company approximately €100,000 per hour. This was not acceptable and furthermore data loss would have meant that the company was exposed with regards to compliance with EU Pharmaceutical GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice) requirements for data integrity and recording which is a legal obligation for pharmaceutical manufacturers.

In response to these requirements, Savenet designed and built a new cloud backup and BC solution that integrates with a new physical DR environment, also implemented by Savenet. It ensures that Rottapharm’s mission critical applications are always available to their users and customers, and can withstand any form of data loss or disaster; from a locally based minor system interruption or server failure, to a major disaster where their computer room is destroyed.

The project took nine months to roll out and is valued at €250,000, but has resulted in immediate savings of €150k on hardware and €100k in software costs.

Lorcan Cunningham, MD, Savenet said: “The cloud approach to backup and BC has enabled Rottapharm to dramatically lower their business risk whilst reducing their capital and operating IT costs. The solution is a service that can easily scale with Rottapharm’s business growth, with no increase in IT footprint or management, allowing them to focus on core activities.”

“Rottapharm now have a hardware vendor agnostic infrastructure, which is cost effective and highly scalable to cope with future growth. It is a Zero data loss guaranteed environment, with many performance gains such as, backups of the servers reduced from four days to six hours and differential backups reduced from twelve hours to three. Also, because we have full replication between sites, backups are taken from the secondary site, so there is no performance impact on the primary production servers,” he added.

Pat Garrahy, MD, Rottapharm said: “The new infrastructure at our Dublin site has allowed us to roll out paperless systems across many areas, starting with electronic batch records in production. We now have highly innovative systems deployed throughout our plant and we have made significant cost savings, along with major reductions in our IT business risk.“