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SPONSORED REPORT ■
Sponsored by
Tom Bambrick, Ascon
Over several years, Ascon built up a sophisticated a week. That wouldn’t have been possible without the
and distributed IT infrastructure serving four perma- virtualised environment.”
nent offices, as well as 30-plus construction sites With the help of Morse Solutions, Ascon devised a
across the country at any one time. As with many detailed infrastructural consolidation plan. This
fast-growing companies, Ascon’s infrastructure grew involved moving Ascon’s entire Wintel and Unix envi-
in a piecemeal fashion in line with the demands of the ronment onto HP’s blade technology. As a result,
business. Ascon’s server estate consisted of 25 Wintel the company went from having 25 Wintel servers to
servers running a range of business applications and just eight.
administration functions, plus a pair of Unix machines The storage environment, meanwhile, which had
– HP RISC servers – which ran a mission-critical consisted of standalone servers with internal hard
enterprise resource planning (ERP) system called drives and an older EVA storage area network
COINs. (SAN) array, was consolidated onto a HP EVA 4400
According to Tom Bambrick, group ICT manager at SAN array.
Ascon, the Wintel servers in particular had become a The company also deployed a VMware environment
major concern. “They were becoming difficult to man- to serve Ascon’s disaster recovery requirements, with
age and some of them were going beyond their realis- virtual machines replicating to standby virtual
tic life and needed to be replaced.” machines and performing automatic failover in case of
At the start of the decade, the company undertook a disaster or major incident.
a radical review of its IT infrastructure with a view to While the consolidation project was going on, there
making it more responsive and to match the needs of was a second equally important project happening in
the business. parallel – upgrading the network infrastructure to
“We wanted to achieve a specific goal: ensure that ensure it could handle the new workload. This was
all our systems were available when they were needed. done using the latest HP c7000 Cisco blade-switching
Construction is a very demanding industry; people technology to connect into the recently installed Cisco
don’t necessarily work nine-to-five,” says Bambrick. network infrastructure. The effect of this upgrade has
There were other considerations as well. Ascon’s been to give Ascon “high resilience, throughput and
existing computer room was being squeezed for space, the ability to have blade and virtual machines in
meaning it was becoming difficult to cool equipment numerous VLANs all travelling to and from the HP
and accommodate additional servers. In addition, vir- c7000 blade chassis,” explains Aidan McHugh, sales
tualisation technology had arrived. This was making it manager for HP enterprise systems at Morse
possible to pool the computing capacity of more than Solutions.
one server and share it out among a number of appli- Now the consolidation project has ended, Bambrick
cations. With a dedicated server no longer necessary believes the new-look infrastructure will have sub-
for each application, the company was now able to stantial benefits for the business.
consolidate its server estate and, in addition, create “Consolidating 25 servers down to eight will have
new virtual servers whenever they were needed. major benefits in terms of lower power consumption
“We wanted systems to be quickly available when and reduced cooling requirements. At the same time,
they were needed,” says Bambrick. “So if someone users will experience a considerable increase in per-
needed a new application as part of a new project, we formance, thanks to the higher-spec blade servers and
wanted to be in a position to give them that quickly. the upgraded network connecting the core network
We recently rolled out a new application in less than and the virtualised servers.”
September 2008 Knowledge Ireland 61
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