News

2008-12-22

MAN Consulting to provide LONDON REGISTRARS plc with SECURE DATA BACK UP & FLEXIBLE IT support

London Registrars PLC, a business support services company, based in Fleet Street, London, has chosen MAN Consulting to provide a robust and secure data back up for their confidential customer information. MAN will also provide support services to the company during office hours to solve all IT related issues.

London Registrars PLC has been serving a wide variety of customers, both face to face and on-line, since 1999. As an organisation processing a high volume of confidential customer data, robust and reliable data back up was identified as critical.

The company needed to ensure that in an emergency systems failure, all data could be retrieved in a timely manner with minimal disruption to the business. It was also important to ensure that the customer data remained secure and confidential. An added requirement, as with many other companies, was the need for critical IT related issues to be resolved quickly during office hours. This required a flexible solution, as the operation did not warrant a full time IT Manager.

MAN Consulting worked closely with the team at London Registrars PLC to set up a regular data back-up routine. The data would be backed up and stored at MAN’s data centre at Maidenhead. This state of the art data centre provides some of the highest levels of reliability available, as well as an extremely high level of security through triple firewalls. A support contract was also agreed upon during office hours for solving all future IT related issues.

With this new arrangement, London Registrars PLC is able to offer absolute reliability, security and confidentiality to its customers through the secure data back ups. The flexible support contract means that MAN’s multi-skilled IT specialists are just a call away. At the same time it allows for excellent cost efficiencies through the minimal monthly outsourced support services package. Operational staff has quick access to a specialist IT support team at any given time, allowing smoother and faster operations.

Notes for Editors

MAN provide information technology solutions to organisations of all sizes and specialises in using ‘Best of Breed' open source or proprietary systems depending on the requirements and the budget of the client. The focus is on providing customers with high quality service at great value – and we do this primarily through our SUPPORT PLUS solution. SUPPORT PLUS offers one point of contact for all IT needs offering everything from IT support, maintenance and advice. When more assistance is required, MAN advises on software upgrades, network support services and IT management through its consultancy services.

For further information, please contact:

MAN Consulting Limited

73 Farringdon Road

London, EC1M 3JB

Phone: +44 0845 468 1315

E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Thin clients aid disaster recovery

One of our clients suffered a catastrophic disaster to their property and needed a working infrastructure putting in place as soon as possible.

We were able to install thin client devices in serviced offices while providing their applications from their existing data-center bypassing rebuilding the infrastructure from scratch and having a working infrastructure and applications even before refurbishment of the property could be completed.

ManConsulting are pleased to announce completion of a rollout of a new thin client infrastructure across 20 sites for a major European hotel chain.

Thinclient The use of thin clients provides a easy step towards standardisation of the hotel's hardware and software by reusing existing investments.

Phase I of the project is completed using the existing PC's of the hotels as thin clients which now allows an incremental rollout of dedicated thin clients as existing investments reach end of life.

Phase II is now simply an incremental replacement of the old legacy as it fails with zero impact for the operation of the hotel.

22 New Virtualisations This month

This month MAN rolled out a further 22 virtualisations for an existing client.

Our client needed an urgent rollout of a 'PC' into 22 of its properties. These properties already had virtual machines running hence it was a simple matter to build and deploy the 22 specialised PC's with specific vendor software and roll them out into the properties from Exeter to Inverness without ever leaving the office.

The project had some urgency, the software had to be deployed for end of year reporting and ordering physical PC's with an installed OS, installing the vendor and peripheral software would have proven a drain of resources whether PC's were delivered to each site and the software installed remotely or delivered centrally and the PC's re-imaged.

By delivering a pre-built and configured virtual machine on DVD to each site the project was completed in 3 days at a cost to our client similar to the cost of shipping 22 PC's by courier.

As an added benefit the "Virtual PC" takes up no space in the client offices nor needs a network socket or power point. At the client sites the only intervention required was to insert the DVD into one of the existing PC's.

Novell Virtualisation White Paper

As A Novell Partner and experts in Virtualisation we are pleased to highlight a Novell White Paper available for download on their site. (See links)

MAN Consulting have already performed virtualisations on hundreds of servers, consolidating resources and saving our clients money.

Virtualization lets you reduce your total number of servers by giving you the ability to migrate multiple environments on different physical machines to individual virtual machines hosted on a single server.

"These virtual machines each run their own independent and self-contained operating systems and server applications.
By consolidating multiple server environments onto a single server, you can harness more of your data center’s unused computing power and get up to eight times more work from the same amount of resources.

Virtualization also provides the added benefit of dynamic provisioning—moving applications and systems in one virtual machine from one server to another as needed. By harnessing the server-consolidation power of virtualization, your organization can enjoy the following:

Decreased hardware costs through reducing the number of physical servers that need to be maintained, physical space, power and cooling requirements. Virtualization can allow for the deployment of 12 or more virtual machines on each physical server for a 12:1 consolidation ratio.
Increased resource efficiency. When you allow multiple applications to coexist on one physical server, you harness more of a server’s capacity.
Reduced server provisioning time, since virtualization can reduce server provisioning time by up to 50 percent. This enables you to be more responsive to customer needs.
Improved troubleshooting. Because instances of virtual machines can be remotely managed at any time from
anywhere on the network, you reduce the need for physical support visits.

Increased flexibility and scalability. Because new virtual machines are easy to deploy, your IT team can respond more
rapidly and flexibly to business requirements for new IT resources.
Increased productivity from being able to run multiple operating systems on a single computer. Your organization can do
more in-depth development and testing, as well as take on a greater number of additional projects.
High availability and non-stop maintenance. Through temporarily migrating virtual machines and their hosted applications to other physical servers for planned hardware and software maintenance,
you’ll have zero application downtime.
Tighter application security by isolating and minimizing vulnerabilities through the creation of virtual machines for each
application. Protection can extend to the application, libraries, services and operating system, as each is protected
in its own container.
More control over configuration change management since unapproved changes
made to a running application in production can be protected through the ability to rollback servers to a warehoused image."

New 2X ApplicationServer 6 delivers CITRIX-like functionality for a fraction of the price.

Our strategic technology partner 2x released Application Server 6 today (13-02-2008).

This offers several new features and a Competitive Upgrade Offer for Citrix users.

See the highlights here or visit 2X to find out more ...

2X ApplicationServer 6: New features

Web Application Portal: Dynamic web interface which displays the list of published applications based on the user’s log in criteria.
Multiple Monitor Support: Now able to display published applications on multiple screens (up to 10) simultaneously without the need for Windows 2008.
Application Limit and CPU Load Balancing: Limit a user to a single instance of any application and stop rogue applications from consuming CPU resources.
Single-Sign-On: Utilize the currently logged in credentials to connect to the ApplicationServer farms
Multiple Farms: The 2X Application Server Client can now connect to multiple terminal server farms from a single client, allowing the use of farms located worldwide and within different organizations.
URL/Mail Redirection: Ability to redirect email and web links to a local email client or web browser to reduce resources used on the terminal server
Easy To Use: 2X ApplicationServer v.6's clear interface allows administrators to get application publishing up within 10 minutes! Competitive solutions often required training to get started.

Competitive upgrade for current Citrix users

2X is ideal for environments already running Citrix, since it’s pricing is significantly lower than Citrix upgrade pricing as well as maintenance renewal costs! On top of that, 2X has launched a Competitive Upgrade Discount program that offers companies until 31.03.2008 a 40% discount on the initial purchase price of 2X ApplicationServer. Find out more at: http://www.2x.com/applicationserver/citrix.htm

Free 5 connection version of 2X ApplicationServer

To download and install the free version of 2X ApplicationServer onto one central server to seamlessly tunnel up to 5 connections per server onto remote desktops, go to

http://www.2x.com/applicationserver/application-publishing.htm

Virtualisation of Legacy Servers

ManConsulting are pleased to announce the successful completion of a major project for 22 properties of a major European Hotel and Leisure Chain.

The Problem:

The PMS is locked to a unsupported OS running on unsupported and past end of life hardware. The PMS is needed 24x7 for the running of the hotel and needs to be accessed for historical guest data.
The legacy servers are becoming increasingly unreliable and failure is becoming imminent.
Years of additions to the PMS have left each property with unique and hard to support configurations and increased instability of the PMS itself.

The Solution:

The whole server was virtualised and placed on modern, supported hardware thus removing the dependency of legacy servers and failing array's.
The virtualised OS was cleanly reinstalled and standardised removing site specific and hard to support configurations which were no longer needed but inherited from previous infrastructure configurations.
The virtualised machine and clean virtual OS are more reliable, no longer imminently failing and on vendor supported hardware.
The legacy systems are now in a position to be duplicated and run in parallel in order to upgrade the PMS to the newer product with the smoothest possible transition and without loss of data or revenue.
Further legacy PC's also tied into the PMS were also provided as Virtual machines, thus simplifying infrastructure and support even further.

Additional Benefits

As a result of the virtualisation several previous long, regular tasks have been reduced significantly.
Night Audits have been reduced in some cases from 4-5 hours to 30 minutes (including user interaction)
The opportunity was taken in reconfiguration to make the online back-ups automatic as part of the process.
Previous disk space limitations on the aging Novell server is all but removed whilst also moving all network storage onto off-site backup.
Dependency of key-cutting to a single physical PC was removed.

Using the advanced virtualisation technology from VMware allowed the obsolete Physical servers to be virtualised.

Technology Links...

Click here for an OverView of VMWare® Virtualisation Technologies

Virtual Server Portability and Resource Efficiency.

Last month we covered the basics of machine virtualisation and mentioned portability as a major benefit. This month we will look specifically at portability and why it is such a key concept while still keeping as non-technical as possible.

VMware to Expand Desktop Virtualization Solution with Acquisition of Thinstall

Thinstall’s Best-of-Breed, Agentless Application Virtualization to Join VMware’s Desktop Portfolio; VMware Also Acquires Virtualization Services Assets from Foedus

PALO ALTO, Calif., January 15, 2008 — VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the virtualization software leader, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Thinstall, a privately-held application virtualization software company headquartered in San Francisco. VMware is acquiring Thinstall to expand its desktop virtualization capabilities which help customers better provision, deploy and update desktop environments. The terms of the acquisition, which is expected to be completed in the current fiscal quarter, subject to customary closing conditions, were not disclosed.

Virtualisation of Netware 4.x Servers and Legacy Windows 95/98 machines

MAN Consulting have just completed another successful virtualisation project.

As Novell partners we were ideally placed to complete the virtualisation of 20 Netware 4.1 servers from legacy hardware.

The initial project was implemented to replace failing hardware on 20 Netware Servers which are in production 24x7.

Following the successful completion of the Netware Servers peripheral servers and interface PC's of the same vintage were also starting to fail. Already having made a move onto a Virtual Server Environment it was a simple matter to migrate the mixed legacy servers onto the same hardware as separate virtual machines. With the VMWARE Server already in place and configured the new virtual servers were able to be built in our offices and installed remotely. The old servers were then decommisioned with a failover onto the the new virtual servers.

Novell to Aquire Platespin Ltd

"On February 25, 2008, Novell announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire PlateSpin Ltd. The combination of Novell’s platform and automation management with PlateSpin's leading solutions for workload relocation, protection and provisioning will give customers the agility to cross physical and virtual boundaries so IT can work together. Both organizations are focused on helping customers maximize the strategic value of the heterogeneous data center. Novell and PlateSpin will deliver products for complete workload lifecycle management and optimization for Linux, UNIX, and Windows operating systems in the physical and virtual data center. Below you will find details about the acquisition and what it means to current and future PlateSpin customers and partners."

Relocation: PlateSpin provides a completely integrated product suite that automates the assessment and migration phases of data center initiatives, like server consolidation, data center relocation and hardware upgrades, to help customers reduce costs, power consumption and space in the data center.
Protection: PlateSpin's disaster recovery solutions offer affordable workload protection that leverages virtualization technology to protect both physical and virtual servers in the data center, for improved security and business continuity.
Provisioning: Using PlateSpin's technologies, customers will have a single approach to imaging and configuring physical and virtual workloads regardless of platform. This eliminates the manual install process and dramatically reduces the time to provision new server workloads. It will also enable customers to address changing resource requirements at peak demand times as well as in test lab scenarios.
Optimization and Management: Novell and PlateSpin optimize the balance between physical and virtual infrastructure by automatically monitoring and making infrastructure adjustments based on server availability and workload demand. By automating the process and increasing the visibility into how workloads use physical and virtual resources over time, customers will be able to increase server utilization and optimize their data centers by better addressing common workload movement challenges.

Stephen Pollack, founder and CEO of PlateSpin, said, “PlateSpin's ability to manage workloads is unparalleled and is an essential part of making the data center truly respond to the needs of the business. Combined with ZENworks® Orchestrator and virtualization from Novell®, we are very excited about the synergies that this acquisition will give to customers.”

See the full press release at http://www.platespin.com/corporate/newsdetails.aspx?id=269