Business Challenges
A merger meant that our client found themselves supporting two legacy environments based around Windows 2000 Active Directory / Exchange 2000, with disparate hardware architectures.
These two infrastructures were essentially operating independently of each other. This was causing the business considerable difficulty when attempting to merge the two infrastructures together and form one cohesive environment. Due to these difficulties, an optimisation programme was undertaken. The object of this programme was to deliver a common server infrastructure environment throughout the combined estate
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
As always, timescales were tight and many other optimisation 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 a vendor and technology was selected, in this case HP, our consultants produced a detailed infrastructure design of the infrastructure elements, dependencies and interconnections.
The design utilised HP c7000 c-Class BladeSystem enclosures to minimise the data-centre space required, BL460c Blade Servers to maximise the utilisation of the capacity available within the enclosures, Ethernet and Fibre Channel Virtual Connect interconnects to maximise the flexibility in configuring and re-configuring network and fibre channel connections and HP Insight Control Management software to enable the environment to be managed efficiently with the minimum number of administration staff.
The solution was deployed in two data centre locations to provide Disaster Recovery.
