Infrastructure Investment Company
Industry IT Experience
Freedom’s IT Consultancy experience ranges throughout various public and private sector customers. From server or security health check audits, to infrastructure redesign and mid to long term network strategic planning.
The client is a London based infrastructure investment company with offices in 3 major cities around the world, Hong Kong, New York and Paris. The business was wholly owned by one on the leading high street banks who were looking to separate this business from their portfolio in a short space of time. Freedom Communications were approached to provide the IT infrastructure, provide project management for the separation and on-going managed services.
This organisation are one of only three major rolling stock companies in the UK, financing services such as operating leases, procurement, refurbishment, and maintenance improvements. In total the company manages over 4000 vehicles as well as an in-house team to maintain them.
CHALLENGE
Freedom Communications were approached in September 2010 by the bank detailing the project that they would like to have delivered by April 2011. This involved migrating 100 users out of the bank in the UK to the new business, 30 in Hong Kong, 5 in Paris, and 5 in New York.
One of the big challenges in these types of separating projects is migrating all of the user data out of the current business and into the newly formed organisation. Having already undertaken a number of separation projects Freedom Communications were best placed to assist the business with this highly complex project, helping them to ensure that their desired goals in terms of timescales were achieved.
THE SOLUTION
Freedom Communications worked with the internal project team to design, specify and install a global infrastructure for client. This was based on server infrastructure being housed in both the clients London and Hong Kong offices, with both sites replicating to separate data centres for disaster recovery purposes.
The solution was based around Hewlett Packard server and storage infrastructure, Cisco switching and firewalls, the latest Microsoft operating systems and applications, such as SharePoint and SQL, as well as VMware as the virtualisation application. We also installed the Quest vReplicator application to achieve the desired goal of live replication between the
live office solution and the solution in the disaster recovery centre, thus giving the client the best possible system uptime. The solution installed provides the client with a high resilient, highly redundant environment, both in the UK and Hong Kong, allowing the business to plan for future growth and expansion inboth these and additional countries.
