IT Infrastructure Case Study

The Customer – The Client offers a bespoke, totally managed end of life IT solution that covers collection, security, re-marketing and ethical environmental disposal. Since 1995 the main business focus being to manage the entire process for end-of-life IT equipment for both owned and leased IT assets. Our clients core competency is the specialization of secure and ethical disposal of end of lifecycle IT equipment, being responsible for some of the largest and most sought-after IT disposal projects in the UK. They have the expertise, experience and professionally accredited processes to provide peace of mind and an environmentally-focussed IT disposal solution. Based in Whitefield, just outside Manchester, they are perfectly positioned for access to the UK’s major road, rail and airport networks. With a strong emphasis on the re-use of equipment, the customer is the current winner of the European Green IT Award and is Valpak Award winners in the ‘Best WEEE partnership’ category.

The Challenge- The client resell computer based hardware and electronic goods and peripherals via E-auction websites like EBay. Whilst proving to be a very successful avenue for online sales. The client has made commitments to improve their route to market by deploying an enterprise class e-commerce solution developed specifically for them. Keytech having provided the client, managed services and consultancy for many years were asked to help architect a solution that would provide the infrastructure capable of supporting their e-commerce solution that will add more autonomy, allow them to maximise their online sales whilst keeping ahead of the competition with daily price monitoring and analysis. Additionally full Dr capabilities needed to be provided in the event of system failures.

The Solution - The e-commerce solution consists of 8 elements which all have dependencies with each other all elements, apart from the client machines needed to reside on the same network, with gigabit connectivity. The requirement massively restricted the flexibility for offsite hosting, meaning an all or nothing approach was the only feasible supported option.

Keytech provided a fully hosted and managed environment, within their enterprise class, secure and resilient data centre. The solution comprised of 3 physical hosted servers and the hosting of the Google mini search device plus a NetApp FAS 2020 device.

Server 1 was placed within a DMZ environment and would run 2 virtual servers; The FTP server and the Apache Web server.

Server 2 is configured inside an independent VLAN and will run 3 virtual servers; The IIS server, the Scape App server and the Scape Integration server. Microsoft Windows 2008 Hyper-V was the utilised hypervisor.

Server 3 was configured as a standard physical server running SQL 2005 Standard, licensed via the per CPU licensing model.

The Hosted Servers consisted of 3 HP servers, all with quad core processors. Internal storage consists of 2 x 146GB SAS drives configured in a RAID1 configuration. All servers have redundant PSU’s to further increase hardware resilience. Each had Windows 2008 Standard installed. The SQL server included an SQL 2005 Std CPU license.

The solution included the following services/features:

• 24 x 7 full systems monitoring of both hardware and software.
• Gigabit Server connectivity.
• Full backups of physical and virtual servers
• Guaranteed minimum 3MB internet bandwidth with unlimited download capacities.
• All power costs for both primary and redundant power supplies.
• 4 hour response, 24x7 hardware support warranty

Manchester Office Connectivity - The original SDSL connection was not considered reliable enough or have the required bandwidth to cope with the additional requirements for the new offsite hosted application. Keytech recommended that the main Internet feed into the Manchester office was upgraded to a 10MB fixed line with a clustered pair of checkpoint firewall, adding a further level of resilience at the perimeter.