Windows Server 2003 legacy infrastructure modernisation to Hyper-V with high availability and Office 365
Beamglow Ltd are a £16m+ turnover firm, employing over 100 staff and are based in St Ives, Cambridgeshire. They work in the bespoke carton, packaging and printing sector and have been a ctm IT Support client since early 2015.
Problem Statement
Beamglow were running a full height rack of Windows Server 2003 servers and Microsoft Exchange 2007 plus a fleet of Windows XP clients across the facilities. The infrastructure was creaking with weekly server failures, hours of unplanned downtime a month and loss of productivity on the factory floor.
Solution & Benefits
We designed and deployed a failover solution using Microsoft Hyper-V and two Dell PowerEdge virtual hosts.
Application workloads were migrated off legacy servers onto Windows virtual machines, replicated between sites.
Emails were migrated to Microsoft Office 365 with no downtime, data loss or manual client reconfiguration. Client machines upgraded removing legacy operating system from production.
Uptime has massively increased with server failures and unplanned downtime a thing of the past. The agility of the new virtual platform has allowed Beamglow to deploy warehouse barcode scanning systems and new applications quickly and without the need to purchase more physical kit.