Thornbury
Who are Europa?
The Europa Group manages the insurance needs of over 400,000 individual customers each year. They have been operating in the home market for over 40 years and form part of one of the largest independent insurance groups in the UK. Distributed across five sites in South Gloucestershire, Europa take enquiries and renewals through online referrals and directly via their website and call centres.
Why Europa chose Computerworld as their Solution Partner
Europa engaged Computerworld's assistance for two reasons. The first was to specify and deliver a reliable, consolidated and centrally managed network foundation to carry data and VOIP traffic for their new telecoms equipment.
The second was to rationalise their existing server infrastructure that was a mix of hardware and software platforms into a highly-available consolidated server fabric.
Europa needed to work with a company that could provide complete ownership of the project lifecycle from scoping a solution to on-going support and maintenance after the installation.
The Chosen Solutions
Upon engaging with ComputerWorld the requirements of Europa were quickly realised through a process of project meetings and in-depth scoping exercises. With such a radical upgrade to Europa's aging systems, Computerworld recommended splitting the project into two phases.
The first phase was to build a solid networking fabric to stabilise access to the disparate servers located in each office. To this end Computerworld chose a design utilising enterprise-class Cisco catalyst switches renowned as much for their feature sets as their reliability.
Phase two involved server consolidation into a fully virtualised infrastructure. Computerworld proposed a VMWare ESX 3 platform for its leading edge technologies, established market credibility and stable environment.
Delivery and Implementation
During the initial project meetings Europa specified that the network design should be fully fault tolerant and highly available in that should any one link fail the network should remain fully operational.
Utilising a variety of fibre and Near Line Of Sight (NLoS) 300 Mbps directional wireless the cabling fabric was installed. Computerworld then delivered a CORE/EDGE Cisco solution using their Enterprise class 3500 series switches with enhanced IOS. Each switch was Power over Ethernet (PoE) ready to provide power for the new VOIP phones and each switch was in turn powered from a UPS to provide phone and data uptime during a power outage. Two switches were configured with layer 3 routing to provide fault tolerance against a single switch being isolated or failing. Spanning tree and HSRP (Hot Standby Router Protocol) completed the picture with each office connected to the main site via two physical network paths.
Due to careful planning and a full understanding of Europa’s setup and requirements Computerworld were able to fully configure the switching fabric for its intended environment offsite. Proof of concept was shown during a technical project session at Computerworld's premises which also enabled Europa to experiment and test the design rigorously. The thorough pre-installation work that Computerworld completed on-site at Europa along with meticulous project management ensured Europa experienced zero downtime throughout the whole network upgrade.
Once the network was in place Computerworld moved on to the second stage of the project.
Again through a detailed due diligence exercise and thorough project planning Computerworld were able to re-utilise Europa's existing SAN and two of their core servers. This combined with selected new hardware formed the basis for the VMWare platform. Europa's core server estate was consolidated onto four servers with capacity for future expansion, whilst also ensuring the solution benefited from all the associated features of VMWare including high availability, centralised management and consolidated backups.
Highlights of the entire project included a physical to virtual migration of their existing SQL cluster and with all core upgrades happening out-of-hours Europa again enjoyed zero downtime during the project delivery process.
The Benefits and Impact on Europa's Business.
A totally resilient solution.
Computerworld's network solution delivered fully against its objectives. The switching fabric is totally resilient and therefore should the primary link fail then the redundant link automatically becomes available and continues to route traffic without data loss. The Cisco Quality of Service (QoS) ensures that voice traffic is always prioritised and the high bandwidth backbone operates well within expected parameters.
The VMware platform has provided consolidation as well as stability for all of Europa's critical servers including those on ageing hardware. Europa are now taking full advantage of a virtualised environment including...
- reduced capital and operational costs in real terms
- increased manageability of server farm
- zero down-time for planned maintenance and unplanned server failure
- reduced space requirements for server infrastructure
The entire solution was delivered by Computerworld's fully accredited technical team and with near-zero impact on Europa's day to day operations.
