Slough, 16th June 2008: International solutions
provider, Logicalis, today announces the completion of a total IT
infrastructure refresh and dual data centre operations for Travis
Perkins, leading suppliers to the UK building and construction
industry. Utilising HP technologies, the solution has successfully
consolidated the organisation's IT infrastructure following a
period of acquisitive activity, whilst improving disaster recovery
systems and providing the scalability to support the company's
growth strategy.
Following the acquisition of retail outlet, Wickes, Travis
Perkins needed to integrate two disparate IT infrastructures and
review its datacentre services. According to Clive Carter, IT
Infrastructure Manager at Travis Perkins, this proved a perfect
opportunity to re-evaluate the business' IT strategy.
“Much of our infrastructure was nearing end-of-life and we
quickly recognised that our expansion rate would require
significant change in our datacentre environment. Not only had
capacity become an issue but, as the company continued to grow, any
downtime would even more significantly impact operations and the
profitability of the business.”
Following a competitive tender, Logicalis and HP were chosen to
design, integrate and support a dual data centre environment for
Travis Perkins, whilst consolidating all Wickes' and Travis
Perkins' critical business applications onto a unified HP
platform.
With two new data centres providing replication and failover,
the solution includes four 1Gb links to join the data centres and
split the Travis Perkins' Wide Area Network (WAN) between the two
sites to provide automatic re-routing of data and avoid costly
downtime.
To mitigate risk, Logicalis hosted the new infrastructure at its
own data centre for six months to perform staging, porting and
go-live rehearsals. The migration of services and applications took
place over a 3 month period to avoid disruption to business
operations. Carter explains:
“The migration to the new platforms and data centres was quick
and painless. With work undertaken in the evening, our
14,000-strong workforce experienced no changes to the service.”
He continues, “With the solution now in place, we not only have
a data centre operation that will cope with the company's continued
growth but are experiencing operational improvements and,
critically, have a disaster recovery strategy suitable for the size
of the business.”
From the existing position, where 36 hours would be required for
recovery of core servers, Logicalis designed a mechanism to provide
a guaranteed 4-hour failover and recovery capability for the entire
IT infrastructure. Failover of the data centres has already been
tested, and business critical applications were recovered within
just 2 hours.
Confident in the recovery capability of the solution, moving
forward Travis Perkins plans to switch operations between the data
centres on a continual basis, making disaster recovery testing a
regular business procedure. Like the organisation itself, the
disaster recovery strategy will continually evolve to reflect the
needs of the business and will significantly reduce management time
and ease auditing processes.
“For a growing company like Travis Perkins, a flexible IT
infrastructure and scalable IT strategy is critical to support
change within the business,” comments Tom Kelly, managing director
of Logicalis UK. “The dual data centre environment has not only
provided Travis Perkins with the capacity for growth but has
increased resilience across the organisation and enabled them to
introduce an innovative approach to ongoing disaster recovery that
is rarely seen outside the financial services sector.”
About Travis Perkins
Travis Perkins is the
UK 's leading builders merchant and supplies more than 100,000
product lines to the trade. These include building materials,
plumbing and heating, landscaping materials, timber and sheet
materials, painting and decorating, dry lining and insulation, tool
and equipment hire, doors and joinery, bathrooms and kitchens and
hand and power tools, along with a wide range of services including
the trade-dedicated website, Trademate, http://www.trademate.co.uk/. More
information can be found by visiting the website http://www.travisperkins.co.uk/
Travis Perkins plc
The Travis Perkins
Group includes some of the leading brands in the UK construction
industry including Travis Perkins, Keyline, City Plumbing Supplies,
CCF, Benchmarx, Wickes and Tile Giant – and has over 1,196 branches
across the UK.
About Logicalis
Logicalis is an international provider of integrated ICT solutions,
delivering secure, converged computing and communications
infrastructure and services.
We can provide the architecture, deployment, integration and
management of networks and systems to deliver leading edge
solutions that create value for our customers and meet their
business needs now and into the future.
Logicalis is a trusted provider of multi-vendor solutions and
services operating in the most complex and challenging business
environments. Our relationships with the industry's leading
technology suppliers, combined with our business understanding
enable you to invest with confidence.
The Logicalis Group is a division of Datatec Limited (DTC), a $3.2
billion multi-national Group listed on the AIM market of the LSE
and the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. With international
headquarters in the UK, the Logicalis Group has operations in the
US, UK, Germany, and South America.
Logicalis UK has achieved independent certification for its
integrated management system, information security, IT service
management offerings and its environmental standards: ISO 9001; ISO
27001; ISO 20000 and ISO14001 respectively.
For more information, please
contact:
Charlotte Sandy/Jennifer Manning
Cohesive Communications
T: +44 (0) 1291 626200
E: logicalis@cohesive.uk.com