16th June 2008
Logicalis Provide Infrastructure Refresh To Support Business Growth And Improve Operational Performance
Slough, 16th June 2008: International solutions provider, Logicalis, today announces the completion of a total IT infrastructure refresh and dual data centre operations for Travis Perkins, leading suppliers to the UK building and construction industry. Utilising HP technologies, the solution has successfully consolidated the organisation's IT infrastructure following a period of acquisitive activity, whilst improving disaster recovery systems and providing the scalability to support the company's growth strategy.
Following the acquisition of retail outlet, Wickes, Travis Perkins needed to integrate two disparate IT infrastructures and review its datacentre services. According to Clive Carter, IT Infrastructure Manager at Travis Perkins, this proved a perfect opportunity to re-evaluate the business' IT strategy.
“Much of our infrastructure was nearing end-of-life and we quickly recognised that our expansion rate would require significant change in our datacentre environment. Not only had capacity become an issue but, as the company continued to grow, any downtime would even more significantly impact operations and the profitability of the business.”
Following a competitive tender, Logicalis and HP were chosen to design, integrate and support a dual data centre environment for Travis Perkins, whilst consolidating all Wickes' and Travis Perkins' critical business applications onto a unified HP platform.
With two new data centres providing replication and failover, the solution includes four 1Gb links to join the data centres and split the Travis Perkins' Wide Area Network (WAN) between the two sites to provide automatic re-routing of data and avoid costly downtime.
To mitigate risk, Logicalis hosted the new infrastructure at its own data centre for six months to perform staging, porting and go-live rehearsals. The migration of services and applications took place over a 3 month period to avoid disruption to business operations. Carter explains:
“The migration to the new platforms and data centres was quick and painless. With work undertaken in the evening, our 14,000-strong workforce experienced no changes to the service.”
He continues, “With the solution now in place, we not only have a data centre operation that will cope with the company's continued growth but are experiencing operational improvements and, critically, have a disaster recovery strategy suitable for the size of the business.”
From the existing position, where 36 hours would be required for recovery of core servers, Logicalis designed a mechanism to provide a guaranteed 4-hour failover and recovery capability for the entire IT infrastructure. Failover of the data centres has already been tested, and business critical applications were recovered within just 2 hours.
Confident in the recovery capability of the solution, moving forward Travis Perkins plans to switch operations between the data centres on a continual basis, making disaster recovery testing a regular business procedure. Like the organisation itself, the disaster recovery strategy will continually evolve to reflect the needs of the business and will significantly reduce management time and ease auditing processes.
“For a growing company like Travis Perkins, a flexible IT infrastructure and scalable IT strategy is critical to support change within the business,” comments Tom Kelly, managing director of Logicalis UK. “The dual data centre environment has not only provided Travis Perkins with the capacity for growth but has increased resilience across the organisation and enabled them to introduce an innovative approach to ongoing disaster recovery that is rarely seen outside the financial services sector.”
About Travis Perkins
Travis Perkins is the UK 's leading builders merchant and supplies more than 100,000 product lines to the trade. These include building materials, plumbing and heating, landscaping materials, timber and sheet materials, painting and decorating, dry lining and insulation, tool and equipment hire, doors and joinery, bathrooms and kitchens and hand and power tools, along with a wide range of services including the trade-dedicated website, Trademate, www.trademate.co.uk. More information can be found by visiting the website www.travisperkins.co.uk
Travis Perkins plc
The Travis Perkins Group includes some of the leading brands in the UK construction industry including Travis Perkins, Keyline, City Plumbing Supplies, CCF, Benchmarx, Wickes and Tile Giant – and has over 1,196 branches across the UK.
About Logicalis
Logicalis is an international provider of integrated ICT solutions, delivering secure, converged computing and communications infrastructure and services.
We can provide the architecture, deployment, integration and management of networks and systems to deliver leading edge solutions that create value for our customers and meet their business needs now and into the future.
Logicalis is a trusted provider of multi-vendor solutions and services operating in the most complex and challenging business environments. Our relationships with the industry's leading technology suppliers, combined with our business understanding enable you to invest with confidence.
The Logicalis Group is a division of Datatec Limited (DTC), a $3.2 billion multi-national Group listed on the AIM market of the LSE and the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. With international headquarters in the UK, the Logicalis Group has operations in the US, UK, Germany, and South America.
Logicalis UK has achieved independent certification for its integrated management system, information security, IT service management offerings and its environmental standards: ISO 9001; ISO 27001; ISO 20000 and ISO14001 respectively.
For more information, please contact:
Charlotte Sandy/Jennifer Manning
Cohesive Communications
T: +44 (0) 1291 626200
E: logicalis@cohesive.uk.com
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