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IT infrastructure refresh supports more reliable computing and better client management for Stewarts Care

Leading voluntary healthcare provider, Stewarts Care will benefit from resilient, high performance computing and better client management, thanks to a major server and storage refresh, financed by HP and deployed by MJ Flood Technology.

The project involves reducing the server footprint from 12 units to just two VMware virtualised HP DL380 servers, configuring 23 Terabytes (TB) of raw data storage, based on a HP MSA P2000 platform and deploying fully resilient disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity across two campuses.  Financed over five years through HP Financial Services, more than 850 Stewarts’ employees can benefit from the latest technology now without the need for upfront capital expenditure.

“We have a more secure, robust IT infrastructure that’s easier to manage and control with plenty of scalability for future growth. The upgrade was only possible because of finance.  MJ Flood Technology have steered us in the right direction for a long time and their deep understanding of our organisation and services is reflected in the quality of their tender response and deployment.”

Brendan O’Connor, head of ICT services with Stewarts Care. 

Download Case Study: Stewarts-Care

Planning for the unexpected

Stewarts Care provides disability support services for adults and children and is spread across two campuses, with 40 buildings at Palmerston, Dublin 20 and several buildings in Rossecourt, Co Dublin.  It also has 30 community hostels at various locations in Dublin and Kildare which support semi-independent living for service-users.

With a wireless link between headquarters in Palmerston and Rossecourt Resource Centre, the comms room in Rossecourt was deemed a perfect location for a secondary set of infrastructure to support Stewarts’ DR plans as Pat O’Neill, senior technical architect with MJ Flood Technology explains:

“We introduced a disaster recovery platform of hardware and software with 15TB of manual failover,” he says. “Based on Veeam Snapshot and replication technology, the solution involves configuration of a cost-effective, high-performing modular SAN array that continuously replicates data changes to the Rossecourt campus.

If the primary campus is lost, or primary WAN connectivity fails, IT can perform a failover immediately that switches to identical updated Virtual Servers on the other campus continuing with minimum downtime and disruption.”

The decision to move to a HP storage platform was swayed by the company’s ability to provide RAID 50 capability. This involves creating a large, single ‘datastore’ across a high number of fast input/output (IO) disks for easy data access and retrieval. Creating a RAID 50 array and balancing the load across multiple disks ensures better performance, higher resilience and increases mean time between disk failures (MTBF).

“A lot of healthcare providers use RAID 50 data warehousing for radiography and patient record systems,” explains O’Connor. “HP was the only technology provider that could offer this large-scale storage capacity at a reasonable price-point,” he adds.

Service-user records at any of the 30 on-campus residences or various community-based hostels are accessed by employees on Stewarts’ Service Users Record Application – SURA.  In the event of any service interruption at headquarters, they can use the operating environment at Rossecourt for business continuity.

Email Security

Stewarts have also beefed up information security with the addition of email and web filtering and security software.

“With just three people in the ICT department, we need to use our time as efficiently as possible,” explains O’Connor.  By enforcing security policy at perimeter level, we reduce the overhead of ensuring that browsers and clients are zero-day patched and fully compliant.”

In addition, Stewarts have upgraded their server software to the latest Windows Server and SQL 2012 to support all applications.

Planning for the future

Stewarts’ infrastructure upgrade positions the healthcare provider to benefit from any future moves by government to consolidate network infrastructure or applications to the cloud.

“In the not too distant future, government will have a cloud platform. Being compatible with future government infrastructure availability was a critical consideration in this infrastructure project. Our current network design allows us to migrate our applications seamlessly and we have also future-proofed the storage infrastructure ensuring that it will take us through to the next technology lifecycle with ease,” says O’Connor.

Butler Technologies builds more robust, reliable communications platform with Microsoft Office 365

Mobile staff at Butler Technologies benefit from the same reliable, robust and stable communications platform as office-based staff, following a Microsoft Office 365 deployment by MJ Flood Technology.

Thirty staff at technology distributor and IT services firm, Butler Technologies now have consistent, seamless access to email, document sharing, data storage and web conferencing, irrespective of whether they’re based in the office or out on the road.

Download case study: Butler-Technologies

“With cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 we have increased confidence in the system,” says John Carney, financial controller with Butler Technologies.

“It’s more robust with great flexibility, particularly for staff out on the road who aren’t sitting here, physically connecting to the server.”

John Carney, financial controller with Butler Technologies

IT Infrastructure Review

A change of IT support provider gave Butler Technologies the opportunity to review their IT infrastructure. A number of problems were identified, which would require significant capital investment. This news came as no surprise to Carney.

“We were experiencing major connectivity and VPN issues for mobile users on the road. MJ Flood Technology, in partnership with O2 advocated a move to cloud-based technology as a new platform. We considered the company as pioneers of this technology and experts in this field.”

“I can’t stress how much downtime there was previously,” explains Carney. “But once you move to the cloud, there’s no downtime except if your internet connection goes, and even then most companies have backup internet. You can even pair to your phone.”

“It became very apparent to us that MJ Flood Technology were the experts in cloud computing. A more robust exchange between internal support and field-based staff was what we wanted and Microsoft Office 365 is perfect for that.”

John Carney, financial controller with Butler Technologies.

Problems solved

Moving the company’s email to the cloud immediately solved some major problems for the company.

With Windows XP going end of life, it gave the company an opportunity to standardise on desktop software. They settled on Windows 8, which according to Carney is “much easier to manage”. The cloud migration also presented the company with a flexible “pay-as-you-go” model.

“The Opex versus Capex benefit is great. You can turn the tap on as new staff arrive. The flexibility is huge.”

It also solved a major challenge around large email backup.

“Microsoft Office 365 negated the need for a large backup of Exchange mailboxes,” says Carney. “People don’t archive their email and with such huge mailboxes, the Exchange email server was constantly going down. The only way we lose email content now is if we lose internet connectivity or the entire Microsoft service goes down.”

Maximum productivity for mobile staff

Microsoft Office 365 has also improved the workflow for mobile staff at Butler Technologies. With SkyDrive Pro, each member of staff can store vital sales information, which they can access on tap as they visit customer sites.

“Everyone has a private drive that gets backed up. So on Monday morning, the sales staff can cache their personal drive for the week and they don’t have to connect back in. The sales team can access the documents and information they require on their terms,” says Carney.

Training drives adoption and usage

In deploying Microsoft Office 365, Carney placed a big emphasis on training. Without exception, all staff had to attend in-depth sessions, which covered Windows 8, Office 365 email, Lync and SharePoint.

“Microsoft Office 365 had been in place for more than a month, prior to the training and there was zero usage of Lync and SharePoint,” according to Carney. “Having sat in on all sessions, it was very evident that staff didn’t even know how to find SharePoint. But now, they have been trained to a very high level and they’re expected to use it. We wouldn’t have been able to achieve that without the training,” he says.

Training is something that Carney recommends to other companies deploying Office 365.

“I think it’s pointless if they don’t and is extremely worthwhile,” he says.

NUI, Galway dives deeper into the cloud for its 55,000 students and alumni

Leading third level university, NUI Galway has migrated its online student email service to Microsoft’s fully-featured Office 365 email and collaboration platform. Following a migration project architected and overseen by MJ Flood Technology NUI Galway’s students now enjoy anytime, anywhere access to fully featured and storage-rich email and collaboration services.

NUI Galway had been moving IT services to the cloud for some time but this latest project takes the university’s core services to its students to a whole new level with 25GB mailboxes and 25GB cloud-based file storage as standard. The development also recognises and addresses the growing trend towards multiple device usage via mobile or tablet by providing students with five licenses each for the full Microsoft Office productivity suite incorporating Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Download case study: NUI-Galway

“The absence of complaint is a positive metric,” comments Conor McMahon, Head of Operations at ISS, NUI Galway. “Before we moved to the cloud, we had negative feedback from students on the look-and-feel and reliability of the on-site email system and the amount of storage we could provide them with. This negative feedback has been taken away by provisioning the service to the cloud with Microsoft and MJ Flood Technology,” he says.

Planning for the migration

With the discontinuation of the Live@Edu email service from Microsoft, NUI Galway realised that a move to Office 365 was on the cards. From an early point, they recognised that the integrity of student identity management would have to be maintained in the move to the cloud. Once a student registers with the university, his or her identity contains access to registration for courses, library services, exam services and email. This unique identity lasts a lifetime and was integrated into the Live@Edu system through Active Directory (AD) and Identity Lifecycle Manager (ILM). Garrett Wallis, Senior Technical Architect with MJ Flood Technology explains the technical approach to the migration: “On the face of it, it may sound simple: migrating one set of cloud-based mailboxes from Live@Edu to another. However, NUIG have many complex processes around identity management, which made the transition anything but straightforward.

“The absence of complaint is a positive metric. We don’t have to deal with onsite systems, servers and software. We need fewer onsite operational resources which frees up those resources for re-allocation to projects of strategic value to NUI Galway.”

Conor McMahon, Head of Operations at ISS, NUIG

“These identity processes required a high level of customisation to enable a seamless transition and synchronisation between AD to the Office 365 environment.”

Synchronising data across mail systems and to the cloud

Microsoft generally suggests the use of DIRSYNC to migrate student data to the new system but it didn’t perform the manipulation required to present the data in an appropriate format. Instead, another Microsoft product, Federation Identity Manager (FIM), was used as the intermediate step.

The MJFT team also connected and consolidated on-premises staff mail systems to a single on-premises Exchange 2010 environment and created a hybrid environment with Office365. Address list visibility between students and staff was enabled and a test set of staff mailboxes from Exchange 2010 to Office 365 was provided together with a migration process for NUI Galway to use for future moves to the cloud.

“Through a rigorous set of processes, we were able to accelerate migration from tens of users per day to thousands of users per day and fast track the project to meet a much more aggressive timeline,” according to Wallis. “Using a combination of data staging and automation as well as storage as a point solution, we helped the NUI Galway team overcome every obstacle they met along the way.”

“With hybrid environments, you obviously have to be careful about how email is routed,” says McMahon. “With student email in the cloud and staff email on-site, but both sharing the same domain, there’s a bit of architecture around that piece and the team at MJFT were very good at that. They had the experience and we wanted to work with a partner experienced in doing these large-scale Office 365 migrations in a hybrid environment,” he adds.

Planning for the future

“We don’t have to deal with onsite systems, servers and software,” concludes McMahon. “We need fewer onsite operational resources which frees up those resources for re-allocation to projects of strategic value to NUI Galway. Our continuing adoption and development of Office 365 is consistent with our strategy of providing best-in-class computing services to our students and facilitating collaboration across the University and beyond,” he says.

Hp server and storage upgrade supports round-the-clock production at the Aventas Group

The Aventas Group enjoys robust IT redundancy and resiliency at its major production facilities, thanks to HP server and storage solutions, designed and deployed by MJ Flood Technology. The IT refresh delivers robust disaster recovery and high performance server and storage computing for the company’s 24 x 7 manufacturing operations and its staff at production plants in Derrylin, Northern Ireland, Newport, Wales and Elton, England.

“Our production systems are now running on a best-in-class HP technology infrastructure,” comments Kieran Leonard, chief operating officer with the Aventas Group. “We have a solid production and warehousing environment with complete failover that delivers the reliability, resiliency and predictability that our high-tech, round-the-clock operations demand.”

The group manufactures products as diverse as cement, radiators, container glass and plastics. While DR is also provided for all back-office systems to the company’s data centre at Servecentric, production and warehousing are the real mission-critical parts of the business.

Download the case study: Aventas-Group-HP

Zero Tolerance for Downtime

“Our automated production environment demands zero tolerance for downtime,” explains Leonard. “If the network goes down, glass literally begins to break at the end of the line. If you buy a bottle of wine in Europe, chances are it was made, filled, packed, stored and distributed from our plant in Elton but our production systems are critical in ensuring predictability of supply,” he adds.

Aging hardware coupled with a realisation that the existing infrastructure was no longer fit for purpose, prompted a review of operations. Following a rigorous infrastructure and vendor assessment, the company settled on a HP technology platform for several reasons.

“Our IT infrastructure is mission-critical. If the network goes down, glass begins to break at the end of the production line.”

Kieran Leonard, chief operating officer with the Aventas Group

“HP’s 3PAR StorServ technology allowed us to deliver more with less and reduce our carbon footprint,” according to Leonard. “For example, we can run our production systems on thin-provisioned storage without any impact on performance and with less physical space. We’ve also been able to consolidate vast quantities of data from the desktop to our data centre without having to massively increase data centre storage capacity,” he adds.

Infrastructure Design

Architecture design was based on the principle of delivering a common DR platform for back-office and production, without compromising on the mission-critical nature of the manufacturing environment. Garrett Wallis, lead infrastructure architect with MJ Flood Technology explains:

“Each production site has local high availability. We installed two SANs – HP 3PAR StorServ at each site with automatic failover, so if the network goes down, it switches over to the backup array without human intervention. We’ve also made some of the production sites failover targets for each other and we’re able to use the replication capabilities of the shared 3PAR StorServ environment to do that,” he says.

Intrasite replication provides DR for back-office administration and in the event of site loss, the administrative functions of the business can continue to operate as this data is replicated in real-time to the Aventas data centre. Overall, the HP 3PAR StorServ solution provides the flexibility to provide synchronous replication to on-site targets and asynchronous to offsite ones such as Servecentric.

Wallis also made provision for future data growth by deploying storage capacity of between 10 and 30 TB per site, scalable up to hundreds of TB where required.

Reduced IT Administration Overheads

“Our storage environment is now managed from a single console at headquarters in Derrylin,” says Leonard. “This ‘single pane of glass’ approach provides much more transparency into our network performance and greatly reduces IT administration overheads. System alerts allow us to pre-empt any technical issues before they hit production and we’ve also contracted HP support, for that extra peace of mind.

“Project roll-out was seamless, thanks to the technical expertise and diligence of the MJ Flood Technology team. I’m confident that they will continue to robustly support our manufacturing and business operations for a long time to come.”

Ediscovery and security drives selection of Microsoft office 365 email for leading accountancy and insolvency practitioner

Leading forensic accountancy and insolvency practitioner, McStay Luby enjoys reliable, secure email communications with deep archiving and eDiscovery capability, thanks to a Microsoft Office 365 deployment performed by MJ Flood Technology.

Like many businesses in a highly regulated industry, McStay Luby depends on a clear, documented audit trail for all email communications between the firm and third parties, particularly in cases of insolvency or liquidation, documentation for which may be required in court. As a firm that trades very successfully on its market reputation and solid track record, this is critical.

Download the case study here: McStayLuby

Seamless Archiving and Retrieval

“In our role as liquidators and forensic accountants, it is always possible that we have to either purse legal action or that our actions are challenged. It’s important that we can exercise eDiscovery or the ability to go back and retrieve or reprint emails,” explains Margaret Smyth, manager with McStay Luby.

“From time to time, staff will have to refer to the archive to retrieve email communications. Insolvency cases can last for a number of years and documentation which is say five years old may be needed at any given point. The easiest way to find the documentation is through email and that’s critical,” she said.

Exchange Online Archiving supports eDiscovery for searching the contents of mailboxes. Users can search a variety of mailbox items – including email messages, attachments, calendar appointments, tasks, and contacts. Simultaneous searches can be performed across primary mailboxes and archives, making the process of discovery swift and easy.

Emails can also be placed on legal hold, reducing the risk that they may be accidentally deleted from a primary mailbox or archive.

“The Exchange administrator can use three different types of hold to protect the integrity of certain emails,” explains Declan Owens, sales manager networks with MJ Flood Technology. “We can preserve items indefinitely until they are no longer required. We can put in place a time-based hold for a specific period of time or a query-based hold which corresponds to specified search parameters such as keywords, sender or recipient address. It’s a powerful solution that has real, practical application, particularly for highly regulated industries,” he said.

“The implementation of Office 365 has been very successful for us. The system works very well and migration to Office 365 went very smoothly with excellent project management and technical skills from the MJ Flood Technology team.”

Margaret Smyth, manager, McStay Luby

Security and Confidentiality are Key

The security and confidentiality of email communications is also critical to the practice and was one of the key considerations in moving the service to the cloud.

“Critical confidential documents are often circulated in draft between client and solicitor or bank,” said Ms Smyth. Email encryption gives us peace of mind that our correspondence is secure at all times.”

TLS (Transport Layer Security) is used to encrypt the connection between email servers to help prevent spoofing or identity theft and it provides a high degree of confidentiality for messages in transit. TLS is also used for securing on-premises mail server traffic to Office 365 data centers for Exchange Online Archiving.

McStay Luby has been using a Microsoft cloud-based email service since 2009 in the form of its first generation offering, BPOS. The firm was extremely progressive in embracing, what was at the time, a new concept of delivering email services from the cloud and was keen to upgrade to Office 365, once it became available.

“McStay Luby was one of our first clients to move to a hosted email solution. Given the sensitive and confidential nature of their business, the firm was unusual in that regard. But partners and staff clearly enjoy a high degree of confidence in the email service and it has brought many benefits to the firm including the ability to access email, on the go,” said Mr Owens.

“Email is integral to our business,” concluded Ms Smyth. “Emails could contain a contract that needs to be signed within a certain timeframe and requires a quick turnaround. However we have no downtime and the whole implementation of Office 365 has been very successful.

“We’re extremely happy with service levels, the technical ability of MJ Flood Technology staff and the way in which they project-managed the whole upgrade of our system. They did an excellent job,” she said.

Strong business growth drives server, storage and back-up refresh for global logistics specialist, syncreon

Leading global logistics specialist, Syncreon has upgraded its server, storage and back-up infrastructure to support the organisation’s strong business growth. The infrastructure refresh, designed and architected by MJ Flood Technology and based on HP technology, provides high-speed, high-availability server and storage performance together with seamless back-up and disaster recovery.

“We chose MJ Flood Technology as we were able to leverage the team’s technical design skills,” explained Alan Rossiter, IT director for global enterprise infrastructure with syncreon. “Being able to design an infrastructure, spec it out correctly and get it right first time, enabled us to deploy the kit and deliver exactly what we needed.”

Download the case study: syncreon

Designing the Storage Infrastructure

Strong business growth in Russia, Brazil and EMEA was stretching the company’s IT infrastructure to its limits. Aging hardware together with burgeoning data growth was putting pressure on existing storage arrays, in particular.

“We designed a scalable and flexible storage infrastructure to support Syncreon’s growth,” according to Pat O’Neill, lead Pre-Sales Storage specialist with MJ Flood Technology. “We’ve gone steps beyond industry standards to architect a solution which intelligently optimises use of stored data, thanks to HP storage technology,” he said.

O’Neill specified two HP StoreServ Tier-1 storage arrays of 38TB each, one at EMEA HQ in Dublin and the other at a third-party data centre, with synchronous replication and failover across high-speed fibre links for full resiliency.

“StoreServ provides near-instant storage provisioning with reduced capacity requirements of at least 50%, guaranteed,” he said. “It really stands out from other solutions in its class and provides syncreon with the flexibility, responsiveness and powerful performance it needs.”

Syncreon decided to re-commit to HP as their partner of choice for this latest upgrade.

“Sticking with one vendor is a massive plus in terms of being able to get support,” said Rossiter. “With a mixed vendor environment, difficulties can arise in isolating and troubleshooting issues. But HP support is really strong and that’s one of the reasons why we chose them. Confidence in support allows us to focus our IT resources on more strategic business projects,” he said.

The project also involved the consolidation of IT infrastructure from syncreon’s Logit operations in Hamburg back to HQ in Dublin. An additional 20TB was added to each of the existing 38TB chassis and the server infrastructure was consolidated back into the existing HP infrastructure using a VMware cluster.

“It’s a neat solution,” said O’Neill as it integrates a virtualised cluster into the existing blade infrastructure. So we have a classic hybrid environment in one chassis, which leverages existing technology investment,” he said.

High availability and seamless back-up

As with any mission-critical IT infrastructure, back-up is a key component. The MJ Flood Technology design team recommended HP StoreOnce disk to disk back-up solution with HP Data Protector for disk to tape – providing a total of 12TB of capacity.

StoreOnce easily integrates with existing StoreServ and virtualised infrastructures and provides full data deduplication functionality to minimise storage requirements. It uses ‘virtual copy’ features to take regular data snapshots from the StoreServ arrays and using HP Data Protector sends them to tape, all across a fibre backbone.

“HP Data Protector operationalises the in-built intelligence from the StoreServ solution,” said O’Neill. “It delivers real versatility in that it automatically optimises usage of the storage array, allowing syncreon the ability to move data and workloads between arrays without impacting applications, users or services.”

Planning for the future

“We’ve probably got to the stage that we will need to increase further capacity very soon,” said Rossiter. The project has been seamless for us. It’s gone in and delivers exactly what we need.”