case study: hills group transformed by virtualisation

1 Case study Hills Group Transformed By IT Virtualisation

www.itsis.co.uk

CASE STUDY

HILLS GROUP TRANSFORMED BY IT VIRTUALISATION


Hills Group was set-up in 1900 and has grown significantly from its original roots in quarrying and construction materials into waste management, and more recently, housing development. Hills Group currently has over 440 employees, both office and field-based, with over 30 sites across Western and Southern England.


INTRODUCTION As a business with office locations as far north as Kidderminster and as far south as Dorchester, managing the IT infrastructure and support requirements across the multi-site operation was increasingly difficult. In addition, parts of the infrastructure were aging and naturally coming to the end of life, resulting in patchy reliability. With one IT support analyst and an IT manager reporting to the Head of IT, Hills Group needed additional expertise and resource to make the required upgrades, stabilise the IT infrastructure and provide ongoing monitoring and maintenance of the new solution.

In 2011, Hills Group decided to put the IT requirements out to tender and after a rigorous procurement process, ITS was selected to engage on an ongoing basis on a number of projects, the primary project was the stabilisation of the IT infrastructure. The core framework of the six month project included:

• roadmap for technical architecture and migration plan

• hardware selection process

• software license upgrades

• post go-live support and escalation process

Hills Group needed additional expertise to make the required upgrades, stabilise the IT infrastructure and provide ongoing monitoring and maintenance of the new solution.


THE CHALLENGE Hills Group’s infrastructure consisted of a series of 15 HP servers with legacy software. There were issues with domain controllers, out-of-warranty hardware and out-of-date licensing with some of the software. This was compounded by the servers using one power supply resulting in high risk of data loss and service interruption. As a business-critical function, the upgrade and migration of the infrastructure required careful planning and technical expertise.

…the upgrade and migration of the infrastructure required careful planning and technical expertise.


WHAT WE DIDIn order to ensure a seamless transition to the new infrastructure, a period of planning and roadmapping was required. As part of this, the technical service and delivery team at ITS undertook a series of interviews with the internal Hills Group team to determine the most appropriate migration plan over a six month period.

Once the initial planning stages had been completed, ITS started with the hardware required for the virtualised solution. After careful consideration of Hills Group’s requirements, one Linux and one Microsoft server were installed. These two systems needed significant preparatory work as the original15 pieces of disparate server hardware were transformed into a single resilient, redundant SAN cluster.

As part of the migration plan, the Active Directory was updated and Exchange Server was standardised. Both of which were long and complex due to the number of users with varied storage limits across the multi-site organisation.

In addition, the virtualisation extended beyond simply servers. VMWare View, a virtual desktop solution, was trialled with 20 users to reduce the overhead on hardware and enable remote access from anywhere using a thin client and PC over IP (PCoIP). The roll-out of the full desktop virtualisation was finalised a few months later when Hills Group had a significant office move involving 90 IT users.

In addition to this, ITS was tasked with providing:

• ongoing support desk and escalation support post go-live

• proactive IT management and monitoring with regard to disk usage and error messages

ITS have been very flexible and accommodating whilst implementing the solutions to ensure little downtime within our organisation”


THE RESULT: BUSINESS TRANSFORMATIONFor Hills Group, the most significant difference is the stable working environment allowing them to reduce their hardware footprint across the organisation. In addition, the new virtualised infrastructure has allowed them the flexibility to do rollouts across the organisation which they were unable to consider before.

Three years on and ITS have continued to provide roadmapping services to ensure the IT infrastructure remains stable and resilient. In late 2013, the hardware was refreshed to facilitate a relocation to a new head office as per the intended roadmap. The original hardware was repurposed to maximise the initial investment and a disaster recovery solution implemented, with the all backup data hosted on ITS’ private platform housed at Ark Data Centres.

Their turnaround time, flexibility and knowledge is refreshing. They’re the nuts and bolts of our organisation.”

HELEN LOCK, IT MANAGER, HILLS GROUP


At ITS we’re focussed on delivering reliable and well-planned IT resources that help you achieve your business goals.

For IT that really does deliver, call us on 0845 241 7410

Email us [email protected]

Visit us at Wiltshire office:The Stables, Notton, Chippenham Wiltshire SN15 2NF

Hampshire office:Unit 15, Murrell Green Business ParkHook, Hampshire RG27 9GR

Connect with us at@ITS4Business

www.itsis.co.uk