Development of a Virtualised Server Environment

The Problem / Situation

Skills Motor Coaches and Holidays provide coach holidays, day trips and private hire throughout the UK and Europe and have been a fully managed IT support client of Air-IT since 2005.

Due to an ageing infrastructure, servers were unstable which frequently resulted in downtime. This offered limited stability with applications running slowly, resulting in loss of productivity and revenue for the business.

Specifically, the company was operating 8 physical servers which were reaching the end of their lifecycle. A primary server ran all high dependency applications (i.e. email, file sharing, print sharing, active directory, applications, internet and fax); this single point of failure posed a significant operational risk, and should a hardware fault have occurred, the business would have suffered prolonged downtime.

In addition, the company’s current hardware infrastructure was no longer fit-for-purpose. Physical hardware had been upgraded to capacity and was no longer covered under manufacturer’s warranty. This lack of upgrade capacity and poor processing speed was causing system performance issues with business critical applications often running slowly.

The Solution

As a Manage-IT client, Air-IT provides Skills Motor Coaches with monthly account review meetings and a bi-annual Director’s report. This report outlines projects completed over the period and highlights any improvements that can be made to the current IT strategy and systems. As part of this report, we highlighted the need to refresh the company’s existing server infrastructure to improve the operational efficiency of the business and provide a failsafe, resilient and future proof solution to accommodate growth.

Our recommendation was to adopt a virtualisation strategy based on Microsoft’s Hyper-V technology to consolidate the company’s 8 existing servers to 3.

The virtualised server solution included:

• 3 physical Servers (Dell PowerEdge T710 and T760)
• A virtualisation server (Hyper V)
• A data protection server (Microsoft Data Protection Manager)
• A storage area network solution (SAN)

This offered the best performance versus cost of ownership and provided significant return on investment.

The Hyper V solution was installed on 2 physical servers in a clustered configuration to provide resilience and failover. Microsoft Data Protection Manager was installed on the remaining physical server and was used to continually backup all resources in real time. This also acted as a secondary host to restore the virtual servers should the primary host fail.

The Outcome

Air-IT completed the installation during a single weekend with minimal disruption to the business and seamless success.

The virtualised environment provides a true business continuity solution, which in the event of a failure, enables servers to be restored in a matter of minutes as opposed to days.

This provides far more resilience than previously possible. Data is backed up in real time and the chances of encountering data loss are drastically reduced compared to a traditional tape backup system which completes each evening.

The solution has proven to be both stable and reliable and has led to significant hardware replacement cost savings since 8 physical servers have been reduced to 3. This has also reduced exposure to potential hardware failure and resulting maintenance costs stemming from ageing equipment. The company has also reduced its carbon footprint by increasing energy efficiency.

The infrastructure is now future proof and has the potential to expand as the company grows. Additional servers and applications can be deployed rapidly without the additional cost and time needed to acquire and configure new hardware.  Network roles and functions have also been assigned to unique virtual servers, ensuring optimal uptime and enhanced business performance.

Client Feedback

Nigel Skill, Managing Director of Skills Holidays commented that the new environment has significantly improved availability, stability and capacity which is now unlimited in terms of storage and applications that can run from the virtualised environment, thus accommodating future growth plans of the business.

The cost of the solution was minimal in comparison to the business benefits that have been realised.

Nigel provided the following feedback regarding Air-IT’s service levels:

“Air-IT are very responsive, even outside of the support contract that they provide and the virtualised server implementation that they managed was smooth with minimal disruption. To summarise, Air-IT’s service levels are extremely good.”