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ANS Group takes the biscuit
Tue 9th Mar 10 - 12:00
Leading virtualisation and infrastructure specialist, ANS Group, has worked with well known branded snacks business, United Biscuits, to design an innovative virtualisation system that ensures continued flexibility, updates existing IT infrastructure and provides greater protection of data.
United Biscuits previously had limited storage systems which did not offer virtualisation capabilities and were already overstretched in terms of data storage. The company was also using traditional and expensive third parties for their disaster recovery solutions, meaning that a lot of budget was taken up by solutions that could be easily provided and managed in-house.
Steven Summersgill, Technical Services Manager at United Biscuits said of the decision to appoint ANS Group:
“We have spent a lot of time and resources on making sure our computer infrastructure has been updated regularly over time, however, modernity doesn’t always equate to efficiency, as we found to our cost.
“We needed to maximise our storage in the most cost-effective way possible, and ANS Group has a fantastic reputation in the industry for providing innovative solutions, incorporating new technologies such as virtualisation.
“We also needed to ensure that, once we had the storage capabilities, the data we were storing would be properly protected. We are extremely pleased with the inventive solution ANS Group has provided and we are really feeling the benefits of the changes made.”
Recent investment in hardware over the last five years precluded a ‘rip and replace’ solution, so ANS Group’s design, utilising the NetApp V-Series technology, allowed a phased migration away from the old hardware, while simultaneously creating a strategic storage platform for the future.
Paul Sweeney, Managing director at ANS Group said of the project:
“Our solution to updating United Biscuit’s storage systems without replacing them entirely was only possible with NetApp’s innovative V-Series, which we deployed in front of the existing legacy IBM storage systems, to implement a layer of ‘virtualised’ intelligence.
“This now allows United Biscuits to react and recover from data loss more efficiently, providing a more granular data protection strategy. At the same time, the existing storage is now freed from the constraints of legacy boundaries, opening up advanced storage services that were previously unavailable to the business. These advanced features add levels of protection to key Oracle, VMware and SAP systems for true business protection.
“Finally, the business will now have its critical applications protected and are secured from critical systems failure, both solutions that use existing infrastructure to provide data replication, without requiring costly network changes or expensive hosted solutions.”