BUSINESS CHALLENGE
ENSURE BUSINESS CONTINUITY IS NOT JEOPARDISED BY POOR IT RECOVERY AND PERFORMANCE
THE SOLUTION
DEPLOY A CONSOLIDATED, VIRTUALISED INFRASTRUCTURE TO REDUCE RISK AND SAFEGUARD DATA INTEGRITY
BENEFITS
BACKUP TIME REDUCED BY OVER 1,800 PER CENT; SYSTEM PERFORMANCE INCREASED THIRTY FOLD; DISASTER RECOVERY TIME DECREASED FROM WEEKS TO 24 HOURS
Home builder Taylor Woodrow has come a long way since the company built its first two houses in 1921. Today it is one of the UK’s leading developers of new homes across the UK, and in selected markets in North America and Spain. Following its acquisitions of home builders Bryant Homes in 2001 and Wilson Connolly in 2003, the company’s UK IT infrastructure had grown increasingly fragmented. This made disaster recovery extremely complicated and time-consuming, as Andrew Hyett, head of IT infrastructure for Taylor Woodrow, explains: “We carried out an internal audit that revealed it would take several weeks to recover all our datacentre systems.”
In addition, Taylor Woodrow’s legacy servers and storage system were also affecting backup performance and the availability of core applications, such as email, which is used to send out around £6.5 million worth of orders per month. “We were experiencing email outages once or twice a month and backup had become so drawn out that it was taking around 14 hours to complete,” comments Hyett. To address these problems, Taylor Woodrow initiated Project Racer, which was designed to provide the company with a resilient and consolidated backend infrastructure.
To help minimise the risk and complexity of the multi-million pound project – which not only involved migrating six critical business systems but also implementing a virtualised server environment and establishing a rapid data replication link – Taylor Woodrow turned to Computacenter Services.
“This was one of the most complicated IT projects undertaken by Taylor Woodrow and was both cutting-edge for our IT staff and highly visible to the business as a whole,” comments Hyett. “Computacenter Services demonstrated that it had the technical expertise and understood our individual pain and risk points.” To help mitigate the risk associated with the project, Computacenter Services helped to design, with Taylor Woodrow employees, a replica environment to test the new systems – which included seven IBM enterprise servers and a 14 terabyte IBM storage area network system.
After the new infrastructure went live in December 2005, the project team turned its attention to migrating the applications, which included two ERP construction solutions, the company’s email platform, human resources systems, and document and facilities management software. Computacenter Services also worked with IBM to establish a data replication link to Taylor Woodrow’s IBM disaster recovery site. The migration of the applications to the new virtualised environment was completed in March 2006 using a bespoke Computacenter process, which has since been adopted by Taylor Woodrow for all future application deployments.
The performance of Taylor Woodrow’s IT applications has dramatically increased since being transferred to the new infrastructure.
As Hyett explains: “Some queries that used to take 30 minutes can now be completed in a minute. Email is also a lot more reliable now, which helps improve the productivity of our 3,500 users.”
The new infrastructure – which, along with Taylor Woodrow’s 250 Windows servers, is being supported by Computacenter Services under a three-year maintenance contract – has also enabled other significant efficiency gains.
“We can now recover our systems in 24 hours and perform a backup in just 45 minutes,” adds Hyett. The new environment will also support the introduction of a centralised backup strategy for data stored locally at Taylor Woodrow’s 350-plus home building and construction sites for implementation in the future.
“We now have a simplified, standardised and more stable infrastructure,” comments Hyett. “By consolidating our key back office servers by 70 per cent and introducing virtualisation, we have not only simplified IT support but also enhanced business agility. By having the ability to put more applications on fewer servers we will be able to reduce capital spend and increase our return on investment.”
FURTHER INFORMATION
For more information go to www.computacenter.com/technology-solutions
