Business Challenges
Increasing demand from the business for new applications and services to maintain a competitive edge in a demanding market meant that both data centre space and power utilisation were reaching their limit. To meet the increasing demands of the business a review of the current infrastructure and methodology in delivering new applications and services was required.
After a review by the client it was decided the optimisation programme required the following deliverables:
- A space and energy efficient platform
- An administration efficient platform
- Server and application resilience
- Reduced time to market new applications and services
As always, timescales were tight and many other projects depended upon the successful delivery of the core infrastructure.
The Solution
Individuals within our consultancy team were assigned to the project and became involved with the client at an early stage. This helped to maintain consistency and ensure full working knowledge of other related projects. Once fully engaged, our consultants investigated various technologies that would meet the client’s objectives and ran workshops to enable the client to evaluate the various options available.
Once the vendors and associated technologies were selected, in this case SUN, HP, EMC and VMware our consultants produced a detailed infrastructure design of the infrastructure elements, dependencies, interconnections and implementation methodology.
The design utilised SUN Sparc based servers as the platform for consolidating the various Oracle databases in use across the business, thereby reducing the number of smaller less efficient legacy Sun platforms. HP c7000 c-Class BladeSystem enclosures to minimise the data-centre space required, combined with power efficient BL480c Blade Servers to provide scalability for the virtualised Windows environment. An EMC SAN to provide a resilient shared storage infrastructure replacing the legacy DAS approach to data storage. VMware Vi3 to enable virtualisation of the increasing windows server estate and provide server and application high availability. HP Insight Control Management and VMware Virtual Center software to enable the environment to be managed both efficiently and with the minimum number of administration staff.
The project was rolled out by the client’s own support team with guidance and support from Shift F7 consultants.
