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The Chartered Institute of Marketing

SCC has helped The Chartered Institute of Marketing create a flexible and powerful IT infrastructure for the future, while reducing energy costs, physical footprint and management overhead.

“The way SCC work with us is as important as the solution they propose. Their professional approach to project execution, keeping us informed about progress and issues at all times, was key”

The Chartered Institute of Marketing has a mission to be the pre-eminent body on marketing practice, standards and associated knowledge. It is the leading international professional marketing body and is acknowledged by governments and the business community for thought leadership in marketing. Demand for its web-based knowledge distribution and professional development services is growing fast.

Recently, John Stevens, MIS Manager at The Institute, was faced with the increasing limitations of an aging server population. There was not enough processing power for peak workloads and insufficient capacity to meet the demand for new web services. In addition, much needed software upgrades for the database environment required more advanced hardware and there was no more space for additional equipment.

John already had a good working relationship with SCC and trusted them to provide impartial advice, so he approached them with his requirements to help him determine the optimum solution.

A simple like-for-like hardware replacement strategy using modern, more powerful servers was an option, but this would be expensive and did not address the issue of limited space. SCC recommended consolidation of the infrastructure using virtualisation techniques to better address The Institute’s business needs. The proposed approach greatly reduced the number of servers that would be needed with the resulting benefits of reduced cost, space and power needs.

A process of investigation and dialogue followed where SCC consultants presented information on a number of innovative technologies that would be used to implement the solution, including server virtualisation from VMware and HP blade servers.

The Power of Virtualisation

Without direct experience of the technology, The Chartered Institute of Marketing had to be convinced that running production workloads on virtual servers was safe. Through a combination of workshops, meetings and demonstrations SCC was able to show The Institute that VMware’s virtualisation software was mature and entirely practical for business solutions, while enabling optimum utilisation of server hardware.

John decided to adopt a VMware solution for the majority of The Institute’s server functions, replacing fifteen physical servers with just four new HP c-Class blade servers with centralised storage provided by an HP StorageWorks EVA 3000 SAN which was already in place, but needed upgrading.

The virtualisation approach is highly flexible and resilient. By removing the rigid relationships of applications to dedicated hardware, virtualised servers dramatically reduce the amount of hardware needed yet can respond quickly to peaks in demand. A further benefit is the built-in resilience to hardware faults, as services switch automatically to a new server in the event of failure.

“The reduction in hardware needed, together with the small footprint of the HP blade servers, is of enormous benefit to us, as is being able to manage the entire virtualised server environment from a single console,” says John.

Virtualisation was also able to play a key part in a major database upgrade activity. The Institute needed to move a business critical database to SQL Server 2005. This was, however, known to be a complex and difficult task, so an ‘in place’ upgrade strategy was impractical as this would mean interrupting the service for an unpredictable length of time.

The safer, parallel development option, leaving the live system in place until the new version was ready for a clean cutover, would require additional HP Itanium servers. SCC proposed that a virtual environment be used as a temporary production environment instead. SCC consultants carried out sizing estimates to confirm this was achievable and built the new environment in conjunction with The Institute. SCC then assisted The Institute with the migration from the physical HP servers to running their database fully within the virtualised environment. This was completed with just a couple of minutes of downtime. If there had been problems then falling back to the original server would have been just as easy. This was an ideal migration strategy that significantly reduced both technical and business risks for such a complex software upgrade.

“By using the virtual server environment to host development and test systems for the new database we saved the cost of additional hardware for the project, and gave ourselves time and resources to do the job properly,” observed John. When the new database implementation was thoroughly validated on virtual servers, the HP Integrity production servers were then upgraded, and the new database service re-established without incident.

Managing the Environment

The Chartered Institute of Marketing has a long history of using HP hardware and has confidence in its quality and reliability. The broad choice of equipment available from HP enables all requirements to be met by one supplier, and guarantees that all components, including networks, storage and computers, are designed to work together.

SCC’s solution featured new, flexible HP ProLiant c-Class blade servers, which were connected to the upgraded HP StorageWorks EVA 3000 SAN for storage. The high performance, high availability 64- bit HP Integrity rx2620 servers used for mission critical databases also had their firmware upgraded.

The cost and complexities of managing a varied IT infrastructure can be daunting, but this is another area in which HP excels. SCC installed HP Systems Insight Manager to provide a single point of control for the whole environment. The comprehensive yet easy-to-use administrative capabilities it provides allows the IT team to monitor all hardware and software systems, optimising performance and maintaining system integrity.

Especially valuable to John’s team are the extensions available for HP Systems Insight Manager. They include the Virtual Machine Management Pack, which provides full control of the VMware virtualisation facility, and the ProLiant Essentials Server Migration Pack, which greatly simplified the movement of services to the new infrastructure. “Ease of management was an important consideration in our choice of solution,” says John.

The SCC Contribution

SCC’s service goes well beyond designing and implementing ITsystems. Sharing knowledge through workshops and seminars plays an important part in arriving at the right solution for a customer. “SCC made sure we fully understood the technology they were proposing, and its benefits to our business,” said John.

Training of The Institute’s IT staff was a key part of the service. In addition to giving formal training courses on the products involved, when installing and setting up the systems SCC’s consultants worked closely with The Institute’s engineers to ensure that they gained the necessary knowledge. This skills transfer was so effective that, after the first two virtual servers were set up, The Institute’s technicians were able to complete the migrations themselves.

SCC has provided The Chartered Institute of Marketing with a cost effective, robust and scalable IT infrastructure that greatly reduces the quantity of hardware employed and is far more reliable. The building space used has been cut and much less energy is needed for power and cooling. The virtualised architecture combined with powerful system management tools greatly eases support, maintenance and provisioning of new services, while minimising points of failure.

“The way SCC work with us is as important as the solution they propose. Their professional approach to project execution, keeping us informed about progress and issues at all times, was key,” says John.

SCC believes in providing a complete end-to-end service and its commitment does not end with implementation. Providing web-based services worldwide means that The Institute’s systems must always be available, so SCC provides a 24 hour support service covering all aspects of hardware and software availability.

“The infrastructure upgrade project was highly visible in The Institute and accountability was vital. SCC gave me a single contact person from pre-sales all the way through to implementation and acceptance who was always accessible and accountable.”
John Stevens, MIS Manager, The Chartered Institute of Marketing