Property management organisation, Mainstay Group Ltd, had previously received a new fleet of multi-functional devices and print support. Mainstay now looked to tackle a degrading IT infrastructure that struggled to keep up with the demands of the business and had started to show signs of hardware failure.
Mainstay once again approached EBC Group with a view to updating their IT infrastructure. What EBC Group found was an infrastructure that had become tired, and struggled to keep up with the demands required of it. Performance was becoming increasingly degraded, virtual machine outages were becoming more frequent and fears regarding an imminent hardware failure were beginning to surface.
Mainstay’s requirements were to deliver a robust, scalable, on premise solution that the internal IT team could manage on a day to day basis. Not only was the core infrastructure a key focus, but there was also a requirement to improve the backup mechanisms utilised in order to deploy a true disaster recovery solution.
Challenge
- Ageing IT infrastructure, failing to keep up with business demands
- Imminent hardware failure and virtual outages becoming frequent
- Requirement to improve backup mechanisms for Disaster Recovery
Solution
- New VMware environment, with Dell hardware
- Tiered storage solution for virtual improvements and future growth
- Backup and replication solution into EBC Group data centre
Benefits
- Future proofed IT environment and infrastructure
- Fully replicated offsite Disaster Recovery for quick RTO’s
- Tiered storage allowing on demand performance and increased IOPS
Approach
After consulting with Mainstay’s internal team, EBC Group conducted an in-depth analysis of their core infrastructure.
- Established where their current bottlenecks were, what areas needed scaling and what future growth plans the business had.
- Provided Mainstay with a brand new clustered VMware environment, utilising the latest in Dell hardware. The solution focused on improving the I/O control, with a tiered storage solution put in place that would accommodate impending growth.
- Veeam Backup & replication solution was put in place to attend to the backup and DR requirements.
- EBC Group deployed old host servers into its data centre, and the onsite infrastructure was replicated to the data centre where it could be brought online in the event of a disaster.
Results
Mainstay now benefit from a full Disaster Recovery solution - services can be up and running in under 4 hours and monitored by EBC Group.
- An enterprise class solution using the latest Dell hardware provides state-of-the-art performance and future proofs the IT environment.
- A multi-tiered storage solution was implemented with SSD’s as the tier one layer vastly improved the IOPS performance and was combined with dual sixteen core processors and five hundred and twelve gigabytes of RAM per host to enable future growth.
- Advance backup software and storage has increased Mainstay’s RPO’s (Recovery Point Objectives). The onsite infrastructure is fully replicated to the data centre to allow a true DR solution with quick RTO’s (Recovery Time Objectives).
- The deployment was completed with a side-by-side approach with migrations out of hours if required. A managed infrastructure agreement enables EBC Group to assist the onsite team when required.
Mainstay Group
Industry: ProfessionalLocation: Worcester
Employees: 729
