Leading accountancy practice reduces IT energy consumption by EUR80,000
20 January 2010
MJ Flood Technology deploy virtualised infrastructure
By designing and deploying a new virtualised IT infrastructure for Moore Stephens Nathans, MJ Flood Technology has helped this leading accountancy practice to reduce its carbon footprint, significantly cut IT management and hardware costs and improve service levels to users.
An office move to new premises coupled with significant company growth provided the catalysts for a new IT infrastructure for Moore Stephens Nathans as Philip O’Shea, IT manager with the company explains. “We take the view that IT is mission-critical for our business. As our IT footprint continued to grow at an exponential rate, it was clear that fresh technology investment was required. We needed a platform which would provide us with the scale and flexibility to support either organic or acquisition-led business growth into the future.”
With 123 users spread across Dublin and Cork, Moore Stephens Nathans originally had 21 servers running many applications including their mission-critical practice-management software. This had increased by 12 servers in just 3 years, driven by application vendors mandating that single servers be allocated to each separate application. In parallel to this, data growth had more than trebled in that time up from 150 Gb in December 2005 to 500 Gb in December 2008.
Virtualisation = Simplification
Using a capacity planning methodology, technical staff at MJ Flood Technology identified that most servers were only running at between 5% and 15% of their capacity – a hugely inefficient use of computing resources. A network re-design was undertaken and using industry leading technology from VMware, technical staff consolidated the number of physical servers from 21 to just 3 server blades housed in a single chassis.
In line with this, a 3.6 Terabit Storage Area Network was deployed providing plenty of growth capacity and meeting the practice’s regulatory requirements. Centralised backup together with offsite disaster recovery is designed to ensure the company’s most precious business assets are protected and available at all times.
“Virtualisation has delivered a number of benefits to Moore Stephens Nathans,” according to James Finglas, managing director with MJ Flood Technology. “Ongoing IT administration overheads have been reduced and we estimate that energy consumption will be slashed by up to €80,000 over the next 5 years. The IT footprint has also been reduced significantly and the entire infrastructure is now housed in half a rack as opposed to the server sprawl of 21 separate devices.”
“Always On” Email Connectivity
Moore Stephens Nathans has made an important addition to their infrastructure by choosing the Mimecast service – a cloud-based unified email management system which provides continuity, archiving and email filtering. “Email is the lifeblood of our day to day business,” comments Philip O’Shea. “Mimecast guarantees the integrity of email traffic with sophisticated email and spam filtering. And in the unlikely event of service disruption, email traffic is seamlessly routed through the Mimecast service with no downtime for users and no degradation in service levels.”
The Power of Visual Communications
Moore Stephens Nathans also took the decision to deploy a video-conferencing solution between the Dublin and Cork offices. Running across a high-bandwidth IP-based broadband infrastructure, the solution drastically cuts travel costs and boosts staff productivity. Sharp picture quality and crystal-clear sound provides a “virtual” office experience for staff, allowing them to complete tasks without the need to travel.
