John Norris of Penrith supply quality fishing equipment, tackle and country clothing from their shop located in the Cumbrian town of Penrith in the Lake District and through an online service.

Running their business on an ageing infrastructure consisting of 7 year old servers with direct attached storage and an out of date Cisco router and firewall meant at Christmas the time was right to review the service provider.

Whilst the incumbent service provider was providing a reasonable level of service, at the ground level they didn’t always have the resources available at critical times. This proved to John Norris that the provider couldn’t give them what they needed and the existing infrastructure did not meet the business needs.

As part of their Service Provider review John Norris of Penrith turned to Concorde IT Group for help, this resulted in a proposal for a complete infrastructure upgrade and increased levels of support providing a business continuity solution to protect their systems. Rather than simply replacing aged hardware the solution chosen included not only the latest technology from market leading manufacturers but also key services unique to CITG.

The aging hardware was replaced by two HP DL360 G6 servers running Windows Server 2008 r2, with HP Switches, and configured with a VMware virtualisation solution including vMotion and instant server failover. A NetApp FAS2020A 12Tb storage array was added along with CITG’s real time offsite backup solution MirrorVAULT and Managed Firewall solution SENTRY. All of the services provide 24x7x365 proactive monitoring with performance and availability reporting through CITG’s Network Operations Centre.

As well as providing resilience in the network infrastructure other benefits to John Norris have been demonstrated since the initial upgrade. Thanks to the advantages of vMotion, a server hardware upgrade was carried out by CITG during opening hours with no downtime by migrating live applications from one server to another whilst the work was carried out.

John Norris of Penrith now have confidence in their support agreement with a company they can rely on to keep their business up and running.

• VMware Essentials Plus including vMotion and instant server failover
• NetApp resilient SAN
• Managed Internet Connections and Firewall (SENTRY)
• Proactive monitoring and reporting 24x7x365 (Observer)
• Hardware Maintenance 24x7x365
• Managed offsite real time back up (MirrorVAULT)
• Monitoring with Notifications, Incident and Problem Management
• Level 2 and 3 Helpdesk services with performance and availability reporting
• Managed upgrade to Microsoft Windows 2008 R2

The next planned stage is for CITG to implement a secondary communications link to provide added resilience to the network. By providing a second line via a different carrier the majority of service issues should be limited providing not only increased capacity but the ability to switch all services to the second line should one go down.

John Norris now feel they are working with an IT provider they can rely on to provide pro-active service to their requirements and within their budget. The range of solutions CITG have put in place means they have the confidence in their infrastructure to support their business along with the knowledge that future technologies can be implemented without impacting on the day to day running of their business.

"Over the last 6 months of working with Concorde IT Group we have found their staff and engineers to be very helpful, dedicated and professional in their approach to our business needs.  We have enjoyed working with Mike Pencavel who has made the whole project very easy for us." John Norris, Owner.