Data Centre installation of new corporate infrastructure for Syndicate Asset Management
Objective
Syndicate Asset Management wanted to consolidate its IT infrastructure operating from a number of locations into twin data centres. The objectives were to centralise all services, improve resilience, increase support effectiveness to 17 offices in the UK, reduce operating costs and provide the foundation to rollout new corporate business applications.
Solution
Initially appointed to provide Project Management governance and oversight for the in-house project team to ensure good practice PM disciplines were followed, and introduce formal project governance processes.
Subsequently we were asked to take over the overall management of the programme to ensure delivery of the infrastructure and migration of existing users across to the new platform.
Working with the Chief Technology Officer and Group Technology Architect; a leading outsource Data Centre vendor was chosen to host the new infrastructure and an architectural framework agreed that all services would be built upon.
The architectural framework was based upon using Windows Server 2008, VMware, Netapps Storage Area Network (SAN) and Citrix Xenapp to provide the platform to deploy all new services, taking advantage of “thin client” services for users at remote offices.
Outcome
The first phase of the programme delivered the foundation infrastructure housed at the new data centres with an improved wide area network (WAN) to support office communications.
A new Active Directory (AD) structure was deployed to segregate business operations for separate companies in the group, provide improved permissioning controls, together with a common email platform using Microsoft Exchange 2010 in a high availability cluster.
Phase 1 was was completed by the migration of all users onto the new infrastructure. The installation was then handed over to IT to undertake business as usual support and undertake subsequent phases of rollout as new services were introduced.
