Challenge & Approach
What we did
Business Objective
Reduce costs, increase IT efficiency, enable ongoing digital transformation.
Technical Objective:
Infrastructure consolidation and virtualisation across EMEA region, deprecate where possible, and as part of assessment, denote future rationalisation.
Services
- Project Management
- Business Analysis
- Consulting
- Engineering
Project
Datacentre virtualisation and consolidation.
A pan-European discovery exercise was conducted to identify all server workloads (physical or virtual) and categorise for virtualisation and/or migration into a new virtual infrastructure. A workstream ran in parallel to provide the resilient, supported and highly available datacentre, including a ground up virtual infrastructure to meet current and future needs of the business.
Each site had a taskforce comprised, working with local IT teams and business stakeholders to understand the technical infrastructure and how this support local and regional business units and customers.
Once understood, the service architecture was logically categorised and siloed to manage the change of either deprecation, virtualisation and ultimately migration in to the UK based datacentres.
Each change event was fully managed, with precise planning taken around people involved and impacted, technical changes required and immediate support and validation requirements to ensure the business-maintained operation after an agreed outage window.
The result
Outcome
13 European data centres consolidated to a highly resilient virtual infrastructure hosted in the UK. This allowed the business to further rationalise in readiness for future transformation activity.
One of the immediate benefits included being able to right size workloads to maximise performance in their current as built/architected state. Additionally, the business had newfound confidence in the IT services offering, by being hosted on highly available, resilient virtual infrastructure underpinned by a datacentre configured to match the capabilities in being secure and highly available. This also presented opportunity to be scalable (rapidly) to extend the virtual infrastructure to meet anticipated business growth