When Bam Nuttall decided to refurbish 4 floors of its head office space in Camberley, Surrey, it seemed the ideal time to consider virtualising its 70 servers. Not only did virtualisation offer Bam Nuttall the opportunity of reducing the number of physical servers and cost of ownership, in turn it would mean less racks which would result in a much smaller server room with a great deal less power consumpton. A much sought after goal in contributing to Bam Nuttall’s overall environmental performance.
Steve Shepherd, Head of IT at Bam Nuttall said, “We invited 12 or so vendors to come up with a solution. Within a month we had 8 proposals on the table, and following a comprehensive process we decided that Foundation IT with a VMware solution offered the best fit for us. Their easy manner coupled with expert technical competence struck a chord with us – we knew from the outset that we could work well together.”
One or two meetings later the project was scoped and a support technician from Steve Shepherd’s team, Shabir Govani, assigned to work alongside Foundation IT in an effort to gain as much knowledge and experience as possible about the VMware solution. This was a critical step for Bam Nuttall as Steve Shepherd explained, “We wanted to ensure that in the future we were in control of our own destinty. Foundation IT made sure that Shabir shadowed their every move, with Shabir also attending the VMware training where he gained ‘certified’ status, ensuring Bam Nuttall’s future aspirations for self sufficiency. Foundation IT supported and encouraged this process which definitely made all the difference.”
Approach
Migrating to a Virtualised platform
With Dell’s EqualLogic SAN hardware and VMware licences in place it was Govani’s task to ‘destroy’ or at least to carry out as much destructive testing as possible prior to migrating to the new, live virtualised environment. Testing lasted for four weeks with everyone confident and ready for the actual migration of data, much of which took place out of hours. Shabir Govani added, “The test phase was really important as when we switched from physical to virtual servers in a live environment further change would be very difficult to achieve. We encountered a few hiccups but this was a good thing as it allowed us to tailor the network more precisely. Switchover timing was also paramount and we had to overcome a few file anomalies. However the really satisfying moments were as we turned off each physical server, took a step back, waited a moment and realised we were virtualised; all in all a very successful transition.”
Creating a Disaster Recovery Site
With up to 2000 users across 150 active sites at any one time, and each having a high dependancy of the data centre, the next phase was to strengthen the company’s Disaster Recovery capabilities.The Board agreed and work began on creating a disaster recovery site.
Steve Shepherd commented, “We looked at the options; a managed off site solution or in house; timing-wise a new Halesowen office in the West Midlands was about to open and we decided to utilise this site.”
Additional servers were ordered for Halesowen, 5 in total; VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) was then installed onto the servers in Camberley and the infrastructure to support Disaster Recovery was ready.
Steve Shepherd continued, “Should an unforeseeable disaster occur that is outside our control, we now have complete confidence and peace of mind, that we can quickly and seamlessly failover our services to Halesowen. Our business is protected and it’s thanks to Foundation IT’s expertise and approach that we achieved this goal.”
The right partner - why Foundation IT?
“Choosing the right partner can mean the difference between a successful and not so successful project”, stated Steve Shepherd.
Asked for the highlights, Steve Shepherd concluded, “We certainly made the right choice, Foundation IT supported us every step of the way, their technical expertise and industry knowledge fast-tracked the project, we were even able to reduce the overall number of project days as Govani became more knowledgeable and capable of carrying out tasks previously assigned to Foundation IT. It was a rare pleasure to be this pleased with a vendor and very satisfying to announce to the Board the project was an absolute success. Foundation IT played a large part in that success and that is why they were ‘the right partner’.”
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