The challenge
As a long-established business with complex ICT requirements, Nobles and Son (Nobles) had sought out Iocane’s technical expertise and advice for more than a decade. Due to a period of significant business growth, Nobles had outgrown its existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application.
Nobles had strict requirements about the availability of an Infrastructure as a Service environment as the ERP application was critical to the core operation of the business.
The hosted environment also needed to offer flexibility to allow Nobles to scale services up or down in line with its changing requirements, remote administrative access to the private virtual environment and rapid disaster recovery of critical business systems.
The solution
For Nobles, the solution for a new platform lay in Iocane’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering, which is underpinned by Cisco network and server elements and NetApp storage technology. The Iocane architecture allows for rapid provisioning of server capacity to suit Nobles’ business needs.
In transitioning to IaaS, applications have been categorised according to their level of importance within the business. Those deemed ‘business critical’ received additional protection by being copied to Iocane’s secondary data centre should rapid disaster recovery be required. Capacity and performance at the primary and secondary data centres is all identical so that the IaaS performance does not diminish in the unlikely event of switching to the disaster recovery site.
The benefit
The flexibility of Iocane’s IaaS offering allowed Nobles to stage the migration of systems and ensure the required level of protection was provided for each element transferred to the hosted environment.
An asset management database, domain controller and backup and new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) testing environment are now housed on IaaS.
Nobles’ IT team no longer needs to devote time and capital to maintaining and upgrading base IT infrastructure, and can ramp the IaaS up or down according to the business’ changing requirements, while accurately predicting infrastructure funding needs.
While they retain autonomous administrative access to the hosted environment and control of all systems from the operating system level upwards, base infrastructure management and administration to the virtual machine layer is provided by Iocane. This allows Nobles’ IT team to concentrate on delivering services that align with and deliver high value to the business.
“Making this transition has been easier by having Iocane manage it. Nothing is too hard for them and they will always go out of their way. We can always rely on them as a service provider.”
Greg Carlson, IT Manager
A Noble & Son Ltd
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