HPE C8R17A Getting Started Guide

Case Study

Focus International Ltd. fashions IT infrastructure

Objective

Required a reliable and scalable virtualised server and storage infrastructure to increase availability, speed restoration times and support growth

Approach

Approached several organisations for their understanding of the chosen technologies and ability to design, implement and manage the infrastructure project

IT Matters

• Oers reliable server, storage and networking solutions in a virtualised environment, delivering a robust disaster recovery capability and supporting all business operations

• Satisfies the shared storage needs through eicient replication, protecting valuable business data

Business Matters

• Lowers restoration times from 24 hours to 15 minutes, increasing systems availability substantially and minimising business disruption

• Oers energy-eicient servers, lowering power and cooling costs by 50 per cent and reducing TCO

• Provides a highly scalable SMB IT infrastructure, supporting growth in a highly competitive market

• Delivers a less complex and easily maintained infrastructure, increasing productivity and reducing operating costs

from latest technologies

HPE server, storage and networking solutions transform fashion house’s operations

Focus International Ltd., part of JD Sports Fashion plc, deploys HPE server, storage and networking solutions with advanced virtualisation and replication technologies to create a highly reliable IT infrastructure with a robust disaster recovery capability. The HPE servers have reduced power and cooling costs by 50 per cent while the storage and replication solutions have lowered restoration times from 24 hours to 15 minutes.

Challenge

Availability, restoration and scalability concerns

Focus International Ltd. controls operations from server rooms in London and Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. Although the existing IT infrastructure was originally well specified, more recently, senior executives became increasingly concerned about the availability of key production systems, slow restoration times following service disruption and insuicient scalability to respond to growing market demands.

The complex, dated infrastructure was also expensive to support and maintain while power and cooling costs were too high and environmentally unsound for an organisation that values green credentials. Moreover, the 10MB Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) telecommunications network linking the two sites only supported an extremely slow outof-hours incremental backup process and did not support cost-eicient Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony.

Case study

Focus International Ltd.

“From a server perspective, we’d already decided to move to

Hewlett Packard Enterprise expertise as we sought only the best of the best technologies. We regard the HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen 9 Server as one of the finest in the world. Most importantly, we knew the HPE equipment would integrate well with our chosen virtualisation and replication technologies across the Wide Area Network.”

– Steve Anderson, IT manager, Focus International Ltd.

Industry

Multichannel retail

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“Our main objective was to provide a more stable and available infrastructure to accommodate the demands of a growing, dynamic business without significant additional eort or costs,” explains Steve Anderson, IT manager, Focus International Ltd. “Our existing heterogeneous infrastructure contained only physical servers, included some legacy devices, had no replication capability and simply didn’t support a modern disaster recovery solution.”

Seeking new technologies

Focus International Ltd. adopted a more structured IT strategy and decided to invest in new server, storage and networking solutions as well as advanced replication and virtualisation technologies. All solutions would function under the Microsoft® Windows® Server 2012 operating system.

The small and medium-sized business (SMB) also required migration services to transfer data from the current servers to the new server environment; planning and installation services to provide data backup and site-to-site replication; and configuration and installation services for an upgraded Storage Area Network (SAN). Furthermore, Focus International Ltd. sought an email upgrade from Microsoft Exchange 2003 to cloud-based Microsoft Oice 365.

Before starting the main infrastructure project, the company invested in a new VoIP phone system, deployed two Hewlett Packard Enterprise 2820 switches to support the IP technology and increased the MPLS fibre channel capacity to 50 MB.

“From a server perspective, we’d already decided to move to HPE expertise as we sought only the best of the best technologies. We regard the HPE DL360 server as one of the finest in the world,” continues Anderson. “Most importantly, we knew the HPE equipment would integrate well with our chosen virtualisation and replication technologies across the Wide Area Network (WAN). In our opinion, Microsoft and Veeam oer the best and most compatible virtualisation and replication solutions.”

Solution

Finding the perfect fit

Focus International Ltd. started to look for a suitable partner to deliver the chosen server, backup and virtualisation technologies and to design, implement and manage the infrastructure project. After due consideration, Focus International Ltd. selected Corporate Systems Group (CSG) Limited, a leading IT infrastructure solutions provider and HPE Preferred Partner.

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