The Customer
Our customer is a major British vehicle manufacturer with a long, rich and diverse history of manufacturing luxury, sporting and all terrain motor cars for a discerning market. They sell globally to a variety of different cultures and environments and are now arguably the car to be seen in; this has recently been backed up by their increasing sales and record profits.
Before moving into car production the original founding members of 1922 started producing sidecars from their original base in the North West. Like most automobile manufacturers’ they have been through turbulent years and buy outs before finally emerging as a brand to compete in the luxury and all terrain global market.
The Challenge
ICC Managed Services has been an IT service provider to the client for many years so we already had an understanding of their business and operational needs. For this reason we were invited to get involved in a new project to upgrade part of their network, the aim to provide increased performance and long term reliability.
The client runs a mission critical cluster that has been operational for many years and due to its age, parts availability and critical operational requirements it is felt from a strategic level that it is time to replace it for a newer generation system.
The Solution
ICC migrated the two existing AlphaServer DS20 servers that made up the cluster across onto two Alpha DS25′s, these newer systems benefit from improved performance through the use of faster processors and extra memory. Extra disk capacity was also installed; this catered for potential volume increases and enables the retention of additional historical data.
The installation had to run transparently and any switch over time had to be kept to a 6 hour out of hour’s window and this could only be achieved by building and configuring the new systems off-site. To allow this the work was completed at our modern and well equipped workshop through a combination of client and ICC engineers. Both sides had to work closely together for three days before they were 100% sure that it could be installed in a live environment.
Once installed and running the customer gained from the following benefits:
- Improved maintainability: This means the hardware is supportable with spares for at least another five years
- Improved reliability: As the existing AlphaServer DS20 was getting old various parts were beginning to fail and the customer was experiencing more down time than they would like. The new systems will prevent the same situation occurring as often.
As an ongoing service ICC Managed Services provide a 365/24/7 hardware support service to the client but with newer systems, onsite spares and a maintenance agreement in place they are now confident that they can look forward without the worry of running old systems that were beginning to prove unreliable.
