We’re lucky here at Gardner’s that we get to work with a whole range of interesting customers, who do a wide range of interesting things and LIPA fall right into that category.

The Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts opened in 1996 to forge a new approach to performing arts training. It was co-founded by our Lead Patron Sir Paul McCartney and Mark Featherstone-Witty (LIPA’s Principal), and is housed in his old school, which underwent a multi-million pound renovation to transform it into a state-of-the-art performing arts higher education institution.

As high profile customers go for Gardner, we certainly don’t have one with a more famous patron!

So what’s that got to do with the title of this piece?…well to be fair nothing!…

However we started talking to LIPA mid 2010 regarding a resilience project for their production IT systems, they where interested in our ability to deliver some offsite and hosting solutions. What we found was a couple of interesting things, which has allowed us to deliver a solution, that not only addressed what they wanted to do, but also saved money and provided functionality that they may not otherwise of been able to achieve

LIPA as any good organisation would, had started looking at the benefits of consolidating their server infrastructure and had embarked on a process of virtualisation using VMware ESXi , they had consolidated the vast majority of their physical hosts down to three ESXi servers. However as is often the case, they had reached a stage where they knew that to continue to develop this, would need some major investment, in terms of Vsphere upgrades and SAN infrastructure, to allow them to deliver high availability, mobility and greater scalability to their core IT services.

When we first discussed this project with them, we looked at two solutions which we thought could deliver much greater value than what they had already looked at, as well as providing them with an option for a highly flexible approach to business continuity and disaster recovery.

So what did we suggest;

• Hyper-V and System Centre – because of the hugely Microsoft centric nature of their infrastructure and the lack of real need for some of the very clever high end Vsphere (don’t get me wrong this is in no way a slight on VMware’s capability – we have many happy VMware customers, but increasingly Hyper-V is fulfilling the need extremely well and often at a fraction of the cost) functionality we suggested that a mixture of Hyper-v and system centre would help to deliver the flexibility and resilience they desired, while saving them a good amount of money at the same time.

• NetApp storage – many of you will know that we supply NetApp storage here and have worked a long time with them, but this was another great example of how NetApp provide a solution, which in our opinion is second to none, for underpinning a virtualised dynamic IT infrastructure, the mixture of flexibility provided by the NetApp unified storage model and the efficient storage technologies included, with fast efficient snapshots, deduplication, thin provisioning and excellent application integration provide a great platform for a virtual infrastructure. Importantly for LIPA NetApp also deliver a simple model for easy IP based data replication, with the ability to replicate data to multiple locations, which helps provide the platform to fulfil phase two of this project and provide continuity and DR to the business.

The mix of these two solution sets have allowed us to provide LIPA with a robust solution that delivers exactly what they need, while in the mean time for LIPA, because we’ve been able to save them money in terms of software licencing, they could invest the money differently to give them an even better solution than they had planned for.

I mentioned this to our good friend over at Microsoft Matt McSpirit (if you want to learn about Microsoft’s virtualisation and management stack, Matt is definitely your man, check him out on his BLOG here… http://blogs.technet.com/b/mattmcspirit/) and he thought it was a good story…to the point where Microsoft thought it would make an interesting case study, so if you want a bit more detail on what we did and how it benefitted LIPA and find out what their IT manager Ben Faulkner thought, then check the Microsoft case study over at Microsoft.com by clicking here

So a pretty enjoyable project all in, for a really good team of people over at LIPA, great mix of technology and a solution that is working a treat, this was a tough to beat!

If you want to know more of the techie detail, feel free to drop me a line.

It’s always nice to share stories of clients who use the technology we have implemented for them, fully to address their business challenges.

George McCann of Regenda Group has done just that, using Microsoft Hyper-V, System Centre Virtual Machine Manager and his NetApp storage solution, to build a business continuity solution for one of their key business applications.

George shared with us the business issue and how he used his technology investment to help address it. “As a Housing group our ability to manage our housing stock and provide an excellent service to our customers is key and our system for delivering that is critical to our ability to operate. As a business we identified that we needed to provide a recovery solution should we ever lose our primary data centre and our housing management system with it”

Regenda Group has multiple sites alongside their main site in Bolton, on e of those is in Liverpool and had been identified as their secondary data centre.

George continued “ we realised the key to this was to utilise our secondary data centre, but also look at how the technology we were using allowed us to do this simply. We currently are using replication technology to have copies of our data sat in the secondary site, we have taken advantage of technology inherent in our applications, such as “site continuous replication” in Exchange 2007 or SnapMirror on our NetApp storage, however the challenge presented by our housing management system was that it didn’t easily offer us this”.

This led George to have to consider how he could take advantage of his existing platforms to add replication and DR functionality to his housing management system “ we had two issues with the system, one was it had no inherent DR capabilities and two, it was running on older hardware, which was going to be difficult to replace if we lost it. Because of this, it seemed an ideal solution to virtualise, initially we had considered VMWare as a mechanism for this, but with the help from our technology partners at Gardner Systems and the close link they have helped us to forge with technology specialist such as Matt McSpirit at Microsoft, we quickly realised that Hyper-V especially alongside Systems Centre Virtual Machine Manager, would be the perfect solution for us”.

George goes on to explain “the mix of technology, from Microsoft and NetApp has allowed us to easily provide a twofold solution, firstly by using VMM’s physical to virtual migration technology, we have been able to easily create a virtual version of our live housing management system, utilising the flexibility of our NetApp storage, we could easily then copy live production data into our isolated DR instance, allowing us to test the solution, without impinging on the production environment. By then placing the Hyper-V virtual machine files onto our NetApp storage, we can then use the SnapMirror functionality to replicate these virtual servers to our DR environment, which we can then easily mount on our DR Hyper-V hosts”.

George plans to enhance this further “by presenting to the production server storage from our NetApp SAN, we will then get our housing management system to put its own system backups there, on completion of this, we will then get the NetApp storage to replicate the data over to our DR site, we can then mount this data on our DR site and import it into the recovered version of our system”

“ it’s great to see our technology investment providing us functionality that we had not even thought about when we deployed it, that really shows how the right technology platform gives you tremendous scope and flexibility for your business to be able to meet new challanges.

One of the biggest challenges we are seeing facing many of our clients is data security, especially in terms of continuity and disaster planning, with many customers now concerned about how they keep their businesses running in the face of a major event affecting the ability to access their key business systems.

To this end a number of our clients had met with us to discuss how we could help them build a continuity model, that in the event that they could not access their normal business premises then how could we help them to implement a solution to allow their businesses to continue

We have just completed a pilot solution with one of those clients to prove just how we can use their technology investment to create such a continuity solution.

As this is a pilot solution and of a sensitive nature, we are not able to share the client’s details with you, however we can share the technology approach and how we have used NetApp storage and virtualisation to give a continuity solution.

The current client setup includes a number of physical servers, providing a number of services, such as email and database facilities, internal storage is delivered using NetApp’s unified storage platform, presenting both user data via NAS and storage to the server infrastructure via a SAN.

The aim was to provide two key components;

· To provide a remote “backup” of their live data both application and user data, which would be no more than 4 hours out of date from the production environment.

· To allow in the event of their main business headquarters been inaccessible to have key business staff setup at Gardner Systems Offices and access a replicated version of their current business environment, including applications and data.

To provide this we were going to take advantage primarily of the NetApp storage they had invested in, using NetApp’s SnapMirror technology, we would be able to replicate their business data to a secondary NetApp storage solution in a secure location, using a simple encrypted connection across the Internet. Utilising NetApp’s snapshot technology and SnapManager application suite, we would be able to take consistent instantaneous backups and replicate them to the secondary storage, without affecting production data.

This alone provided and met the first requirement which was to provide a live disk based “off site” backup of the production data.

The Second challenge was to replicate the production server environment allowing users to access their data and business applications from a secondary location, should their production office no longer be available.

Again we have utilised technology to make this straightforward by taking advantage of Microsoft Hyper-V server, we were able to build a virtualised replica of the production servers, allowing users to turn up with their laptops, or virtualised desktops if required to allow them to Logon to the system they would normally see in the office.

This allows us to store all of the users physical devices, on a single virtual server, which then only need bringing online for testing, or in the event of an actual continuity incident, reducing the client costs as there is no need to charge them for the maintenance of physical machines.

We have provided them with a per Gb/Pre month cost model for hosting a copy of their data, again removing the investment they would have to make in both owning, hosting and operating their own secondary storage solution.

We are now looking to formalise the procedure and service level agreements with this customer, in what is a very exciting new area for us and providing an invaluable service to Merseyside’s business community.

To find out more about how this pilot has worked and the technology used to do it, contact pauls@gardnersystems.co.uk