Data Centre Project Case Study - NFG

The National Fostering Group is the largest independent fostering agency in the UK

The Customer

With over 20 years of experience in foster care, The National Fostering Group is the largest independent fostering agency in the UK, with the largest community of foster parents.
The NFA has decades of experience in providing life-changing fostering services for vulnerable children, young people and foster carers alike.

The Challenge    

LP Networks have partnered with the NFA for over 6 years providing a variety of Managed and project services.

The business operated a central architecture design with a number of business application servers located in a Data Centre in Slough, the UK with a local authentication server at their 20+ office locations.

As the business refocused their applications more into Cloud provided solutions and moved their email and database to hosted solutions, the need for the number of servers dwindled. Additionally, as the company merged with other similar organisations, they recognised their infrastructure model was replicated within these other businesses.

To reduce cost and to further centralise the reducing server environment, there was a decision to close the data centre that hosted the NFA Network.

NFA requested that LP Networks, help discover the current live environment and then plan a phased exit approach of the Data Centre with a time constraint of Mid December.

The Solution

So, using an agile approach, LP networks delivered the IT infrastructure project in the following segments

• Completed a discovery of the NFA Server Infrastructure, and presented it to the client
• Established the servers that were no longer in use and powered down
• Attended the Datacentre and removed the retired equipment from the allocated racks.
• Planned and executed a migration of the required active servers to the alternative datacentre and Office locations. Typically, outside normal office hours. These servers included a critical line of business applications.
• A complete reconfigure of the client Active Domain Infrastructure, to exclude the Data Centre, which was originally set up as the hub site, involved extensive testing as were modifying in a live environment.
• Power Down the newly retired server infrastructure.
• Finally, to remove the remaining equipment from the Datacentre.

Benefits

The userbase had limited downtime due to the moving of virtual servers taking place outside of hours.
The client exited the datacentre on time with no penalty cost