Ensuring business continuity during head-office relocation.
Having an effective and up-to-date backup and recovery solution in place is vital to ensuring business continuity. Failing to restore data can have far-reaching consequences, which is why we at ASL design and implement backup and recovery solutions that minimise service disruption and quickly get you back to work. We have 20 years of experience and have helped many UK businesses plan for disaster, which proved to be crucial during Boutinot’s office move.
Customer– Boutinot wines
Established in 1980, Boutinot is one of the leading UK-based distributors of quality wines from around the world. Distributing more than 1400 wine varieties, totalling 44 million bottles each year to UK and International retailers, restaurateurs and wholesalers. Boutinot’s requirement is for an IT infrastructure that is as robust as its supply chain.
Having worked with Boutinot since 2015, ASL were engaged to help manage the IT systems relocation; when the company moved to a new head office in Cheadle Point, Manchester.
The ASL approach
A major hardware upgrade and virtualisation project was planned to coincide with the move. By upgrading at the same time as relocating, we could resolve any issues that arose using the new platform, which would minimise disruption.
Our approach was to ensure the Boutinot back-up and disaster recovery environment was 100% up to date. We commenced work at 6pm on Friday evening, making sure everything was powered down and prepared for the move. After Boutinot’s IT infrastructure was professionally moved to their new site, it was then our job to rebuild the server environment in the new location.
We re-attended site at 8am on Saturday, and within a matter of hours, we had all of Boutinot’s servers back online, with one critical exception.
The critical issue – during transit damage had occurred which prevented a server from booting up.
The ASL solution – using our powerful Backup and DR solution, we were able to export a brand new virtual copy of the server onto Boutinot’s new hardware platform. This was completed in under 2 hours, and all system functionality was fully restored.
The benefits – the new hardware platform has enabled Boutinot to embark on a series of Windows Domain upgrades, Exchange upgrades, remote desktop services upgrades and SQL server upgrades, which are all built on their highly available platform.
Within 3 weeks of the office move, we had successfully migrated all Boutinot servers onto their new hardware platform. In addition, we also implemented our managed network monitoring solution, to actively inform Boutinot about all aspects of their IT infrastructure, hardware and networking. Had our Network monitoring solution been in place, it would have identified the issue with the failed server prior to the move.
If you would like to discuss implementing or upgrading your disaster recovery solution speak to us at ASL.
Call ASL today on 0345 862 0350 and let us help your business to remain up and running.
