SAN Hardware Solution Case Study - Astell Scientific

Find out how our SAN Hardware Solution helped Astell Scientific.  Astell Scientific provide scientific products, including autoclaves and sterilisers. They were established in 1884, with an operation in Sidcup, south-east London, employing around 35 staff.

The Requirements

• To bring an ageing network up to date that will still support part of the original system, which is still required in order to fully function, within a reasonable budget

• The organisation has servers, PC's and operations in the US that require access to shared resources in the UK office

• The ability to separate out all applications currently running on a small business server to their own platform

• Update/replace the ageing 32-bit platform, still running due to legacy applications

• System replacement for increased performance and resilience

• Renewal of network backbone to maximise throughput and replace failing current network switches

The Solution

We looked at each of the requirements and objectives Astell Scientific had set out and started by procuring a small Hyper-V cluster environment, so we were able to create multiple virtual machines to improve the performance of each application. This allowed us to work on anyone application without requiring the whole business to be impacted.

Working with our partner cable company we ran new link cables to the rack which allowed us to have complete flexibility to migrate the kit over when required.

The two Hyper-V hosts were linked to a SAN, virtual network and then a new Active Directory infrastructure was built based on Windows 2016 servers. The Windows 7 32-Bit virtual machines were built to facilitate the legacy requirements that had been holding back the infrastructure upgrade over recent years.
New machines were then built and added to the domain with a common desktop swap performed.

To reduce on-site disruption to the client, the Hyper-V Cluster environment and the majority of the PC build work was carried out off-site at our offices in Eltham SE9.

The customer now has a faster backbone to the business, speedier switches, new machines with increased performance and an operating system estate that is fully supported and secured. The capacity of the new SAN will exceed requirements for many years and is fully expandable.

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