a&o implements innovative virtualisation & DR solution

Few companies today have all the in-house ICT resources they need to support their operations. Most choose best-of-breed partnerships to deliver essential skills and infrastructure, and that applies to ICT companies themselves. Such was the case with the successful IT services company a&o Systems and Services Ireland (a&o).

a&o offers Information Management Services, remote and on-site (ITIL-based) IT Service Management and Project Services and was previously part of the EDS European Global Field Services business unit. Following acquisition 2006, the company was faced with finding new support for its IT infrastructure, hosting and Wide Area Network (WAN).

eircom delivers for a&o
A partnership with eircom has proved to be the perfect solution for a&o. eircom designed a comprehensive, cost effective and robust solution for WAN services, hosting and disaster recovery:

• "Virtualised" servers hosted in Class A datacentre: a&o used its own virtualisation skills to consolidate its hardware to just four boxes. eircom now provides managed hosting for the virtualised servers in its Class A hosting facility at Crown Alley, meeting all a&o's demands for power, cooling, physical security and skilled hardware monitoring and maintenance.
• Data Replication for disaster recovery failover: eircom provides a 100Mbps Metro Ethernet connection to a&o's offices in Sandyford. This supports the replication of data from the production environment in Crown Alley to the Sandyford office, where the virtualised Disaster Recovery environment is located. This ensures full system recovery in less than 1 hour in the event of a disaster.
• High Speed Internet connectivity: the eircom Metro Ethernet link also provides a 10Mbps connection to the Internet for a&o, ensuring fast, responsive Web access for all staff.
• Managed hardware and security: eircom's networking experts at Lan Communications provide switch and router management, monitoring and maintenance services for a&o. This safeguards the performance and security of its WAN, which is critical to a&o's provision of managed remote support to its own clients. Services from eircom include 24x7x365 router and firewall management, web-based network status and utilisation reports, and on-demand configuration changes and setups.

Measurable Benefits
The benefits to a&o of virtualisation and the eircom managed hosting relationship are becoming clear:

• 50% savings in operational cost
• 80% reduction in server numbers
• True disaster recovery that ensures maximum up time for a&o's critical systems
• Supports a&o strategy to connect clients directly to its service offerings

"For us the partnership with eircom really is an elegant solution," said Dan Croke, Sales Director for a&o, "It hits so many problems that companies like ours have." These include:

• How to cost effectively manage and support the plethora of servers and legacy business applications that are in the organisation
• How to provide a Disaster Recovery solution to the business without having to invest in redundant hardware and high specification computer rooms
• How to protect the production environment from the latest security threats
• How to decrease the costs of power and cooling in an expanding computer room as more and more servers are added
• The need for LAN speed connectivity and high speed Internet bandwidth for productivity
  

"If you talk to the managing directors of many medium sized companies about DR, they know that their IT systems are critical and that they need a plan to keep these systems working in the event of a disaster, but they think DR is too complex and expensive to implement," Dan says. "They recognise that having no plan presents a risk to their business, but still they don't act. The approach that we have implemented proves that this does not have to be the case."

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