ARMONK, N.Y., Oct. 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced today it has built a disaster recovery site using IBM Cloud infrastructure, intended to help KAZ Minerals, a leading copper production company in Kazakhstan, protect and maintain operations – even in case of a disaster.

KAZ Minerals is a high growth company focused on large scale, low cost open pit copper mining in the CIS region, and with a track record for the successful delivery of greenfield mining projects. With natural disasters globally becoming more common and unpredictable, the company needed to update its business continuity planning, so it turned to IBM to develop a cloud-based disaster recovery site for its on-premises data center.

The disaster recovery site was built using IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers and VMware Site Recovery Manager with vSphere Replication. The solution is designed to automate the processes of migrating, recovering, testing, re-protecting and failing-back virtual machine workloads and achieve target service level objectives.

The hybrid cloud approach to combining disaster recovery site in cloud with the on-premises data center will position KAZ Minerals to efficiently restore mission critical business applications, including enterprise resource planning and analytics, in case a disaster affects the data center.

By using IBM public cloud, the company will be able to take advantage of the native redundancy, scalability, availability and flexibility of the cloud platform. In addition, by running its disaster recovery system in the cloud, KAZ Minerals is able to avoid spending on additional IT infrastructure associated with setting up an on-premises system.

"With our asset base mainly consisting of large scale and low cost copper mines, we need to keep the operating overheads at bay and the IBM's cloud-based disaster recovery solution does exactly that – by eliminating the need for additional capex while providing a clear price/usage pattern," said Stanislav Dmitriyev, Group IT Director at KAZ Minerals.

The cloud-based disaster recovery site was set up in just four months by IBM Services. The required resources are immediately scaled up in case of a disaster, while in the normal data center operation mode, the cloud services costs are kept to a minimum.

"By choosing the hybrid cloud approach, KAZ Minerals has prepared for its business resiliency without making the IT infrastructure redundant and may focus on the primary operations and strategic development," said Denys Petrov, Country General Manager of IBM in Kazakhstan.

Disaster recovery site consists of information technologies and best practices designed to prevent or minimize data loss and business disruption resulting from catastrophic events—everything from equipment failures and localized power outages to cyberattacks, natural disasters and other disruptive events. Cloud-based backup and disaster recovery solutions support both on-premises and cloud-based production environments.

"We see an interest from clients in cloud-based disaster recovery solutions to help them thrive in the new reality. Many of our clients have thousands of applications.  Maintaining and securing these in a hybrid cloud environment is critical to their success.  Agility is key, and our cloud resources and virtualization technologies allow IBM to implement complex infrastructure projects in quick timeframes and provide large industrial clients such as KAZ Minerals with disaster recovery solutions to address their business requirements and protect their business-critical workloads," said Nikolay Molchanov, Infrastructure Services Leader, IBM Russia and the CIS.

IBM and KAZ Minerals signed this transaction in the first quarter of 2020.

About KAZ Minerals:
KAZ Minerals PLC ("KAZ Minerals" or "the Group") is a high growth copper company focused on large scale, low cost, open pit mining in Kazakhstan, Russia and Kyrgyzstan. It operates the Aktogay and Bozshakol open pit copper mines in the East Region and Pavlodar region of Kazakhstan, three underground mines and associated concentrators in the East Region of Kazakhstan and the Bozymchak copper-gold mine in Kyrgyzstan. In 2019, total copper production was 311 kt with by-products of 201 koz of gold, 3,382 koz of silver and 38 kt of zinc in concentrate. The Group's new operations at Aktogay and Bozshakol have delivered industry leading production growth and transformed KAZ Minerals into a company dominated by world class, open pit copper mines. KAZ Minerals is listed on the London Stock Exchange and the Kazakhstan Stock Exchange and employs around 16,000 people, principally in Kazakhstan.

About IBM:

For additional information please visit: http://www.ibm.com/

CONTACT:
Kate Gazzillo
IBM Communications
kate.gazzillo@ibm.com 

SOURCE IBM