Case Study 2
Industry
Wills and Estate Planning
Location
Leicester
Project
Consolidation of IT Infrastructure and site move
Summary
One of UK’s leading wills and estate planning businesses came to the end of their office lease and decided to move to new office premises. Over many years the business had built an IT infrastructure in their onsite comms room running eight racks populated with servers, switches and an old phone system with ISDN and analogue lines.
The business had a virtual server infrastructure running all of their inhouse systems, with a sixty seat virtual desktop contact centre and fifty seat business operations team.
Giga Ops were asked to review, consolidate and move the IT infrastructure to the new office premises and keep business disruption to a minimum.
Issue
The new office site was a managed service office, with a comms room which had limited rack space of only three racks. This meant that a new cloud based contact centre telephony solution had to be proposed. Only the blade servers, EMC – storage area network rack, and a few key HP servers could be moved to the new site.
The most challenging task was to move the network infrastructure from the comms room and the desktop equipment from all the departments (over a 100 users) between Thursday and Sunday, in order to have all systems operational by the Monday morning for business as usual.
What we did
With careful planning and redesign of the network prior to the office move, we were able to reduce the network hardware to a single rack of servers and a second rack with switches and UPS (uninterrupted power supply). The third and final rack was the EMC storage array consisting of the company’s data.
A cloud-based telephony solution was configured and implemented for the back-office functions and the contact centre. Go-live onsite support and training was provided for a smooth transition.
Giga Ops delivered the IT Infrastructure move on-time and within budget.
Key Challenges: The re-design of the network and consolidation of servers and systems. To configure and implement a cloud-based IP telephony system for approximately 110 users and training, ensuring smooth cut over of phone lines and service.
To decommission the existing IT infrastructure and implement the consolidated network in limited space and within very tight timescales was a huge logistical and time driven challenge. The team had to work around the clock to ensure the go-live date was met.
Outcomes
Key Deliverables: Giga Ops were able to deliver a consolidated IT and telecoms solution that reduced complexity and on-going maintenance costs, whilst improving stability and scalability.
Before
After
