The HealthStore's wholesale operation is located in a large warehouse and offices in the Midlands. From here they distribute their products to retail stores throughout the UK. The company has enjoyed great success in the growth of the health food market and has grown at a rapid rate over recent years. This has lead to investment and expansion in an ever evolving IT network.
 
The problem the management team now faced was how to develop their network further, replacing ageing equipment, whilst reducing their IT expenditure.

The Server real estate consisted of a mixture of older versions of Microsoft Windows server, running a mix of proprietary and SQL databases, Microsoft Exchange email , Linux Servers, numerous file, accounts and delivery systems and Active Directory. All systems were required to be available 24 hours a day to support the businesses round-the-clock operations.

Most of the network computers were running Windows XP and Outlook 2003, but some were running Outlook 2000.

Overview

• Vastly reduced hardware replacement costs 
• Reduced future support, maintenance and energy costs.
• Increased fault tolerance
• Increased capacity 
• Increased performance and speed to roll-out new servers

PhillipsTaylorBrown (PTB) have replaced almost all of our existing servers through virtualization, consolidating our current IT set up. PTB are a similar organization to The us as they are pro-active in their involvement with us whilst at the same time offering a real value for money service.

PhillipsTaylorBrown have been working with Virtualization technologies for several years and at first it was important to demonstrate to the company's board of directors how Microsoft Hyper-V Virtualization technology would make real world monetary savings for the company. Quickly proving this to the board meant unanimous approval to go ahead with the project.

The deployment of two large, highly redundant Dell Servers and RAID arrays gave the capacity to host multiple server environments on less physical hardware.

The advantage of using the virtualized environments allowed for test snapshots of servers to be taken, in advance of the live migration, to prove how certain, tricky, applications would continue to work after the migration. This in turn saved time and gave the opportunity for those inolved to have additional input in to making the migration a success, creating additional confidence in the success of the project.

The overall procedure involved rolling out the new servers, snap-shotting existing server environments, testing the how they performed and rationalising data.

This was completed during the quiested period over one evening of a weekend with minimal disruption to the business and seemless success.

The Microsoft Hyper-V solution was chosen as this offered the best value for this particular client, saving physical server licences (as 4 Windows Server licences were provided with each version of software purchased) and PhillipsTaylorBrown could also deploy the Microsoft Data Protection Manager, integrating this in to the environment to vastly improve the data backup of a 24 hour operation.

As well as virtualizing all the Microsoft Windows, Linux, Database, File and Accounts servers the flexibility of creating Virtualized servers vastly reduced the time required for the IT department to roll out or test a new server.

By creating template virtual servers, the IT department were able to bring a new Microsoft Windows Server online within minutes, to deploy a new application. In comparison to the days or weeks previously required to scope, purchase, receive and configure a new server.