15 November 2013

Virgin Management Ltd (VML) provides corporate and general management services to all of the global companies across the Virgin Group. A decision to relocate its UK head office to a new HQ in the Battleship building (pictured below) near Paddington prompted the firm to evaluate its IT requirements.

With its physical infrastructure coming to the end of warranty and supportable life, VML concluded that its existing system was too restrictive and limited in scalability. With many disparate components bolted on over the years, it required a great deal of management, such as client updates and upgrades on local user machines, which meant high opex. VML also lacked a robust disaster recovery (DR) strategy.

After a consultation with Codestone, the firm decided to go for a ‘full cloud’ IaaS platform which removed the need for dedicated hardware in its regional offices. The aim was to provide 200 users with a centralised and scalable system via Citrix XenDesktop, with a failover DR plan deliverable to any device or user, thus expanding flexibility whilst reducing management costs.

All VML’s data, settings and virtual servers are now backed up on a daily basis and replicated to one of two data centres. Key workloads are automatically sent to a separate site and protected by VMware’s Site Recovery Manager (SRM). In the event of a total primary data centre failure (such as a fire), Codestone says SRM will failover protected workloads to the secondary data centre within 30 minutes. Nonessential workloads will be manually recovered within two hours.

To enable staff with any supported devices to use IM, video conferencing and VoIP, Codestone designed and implemented a new Microsoft Lync server. It also migrated the existing Blackberry Enterprise Server to the new system for ongoing Blackberry device management. Supported devices can run applications without an active connection to the cloud, enabling users to work on local versions. They can then sync their applications and data when a connection is restored.

The firm adds that it built the IaaS platform in parallel to VML’s office move, and minimised disruption by keeping all legacy systems in service during the process. It carried out a staged approach to the cloud migration project, making it achievable in manageable steps and using a single ‘Gold Build’ Citrix desktop image to deliver all user applications and services.