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Adding value through partnership

So says Gary Sussex, of Newham Council, when describing the benefits of partnering with the IT provider for the past decade. The Council first entered into the 10 year agreement with XMA in 2004 after HP won a contract to supply server, desktop and portable devices through a tendered leasing scheme.

Mr Sussex explains: “We signed the ten-year agreement with HP to provide Newham with the application servers and infrastructure required to support our citizens, we run a mixture of application such as payments services, council tax, etc and host our website in-house”. It also provides the technology used in the back office by 5000 office based staff.

“The whole of the Intel based estate runs on HP equipment including the data centre server and all end user devices (EUD), PCs, laptops, all the equipment have pre-defined refresh incorporated in the lease – all this is provided through XMA. We chose the leasing route as it offered us extra flexibility for managing our IT systems – and XMA has been essential in making the solution work for us.”

Adding Value

He added: “The real benefit of XMA is the value-add they can bring. They deliver the server equipment for us, unpack it, make sure the hardware configuration is correct and put it in the racks for us.

“Our data centre is over the other side of the city so this is a real benefit for us. We have desktop support staff based alongside the data centre who can greet XMA’s technical staff. It means server support technicians don’t have to on-site at that point. It saves them effort and lost productivity. If there are any issues during the installation process there are XMA engineers on site and they can diagnose & rectify the problem straight away.”

As part of the contract, Newham Council refresh all end user devices every four years. However, XMA are flexible enough to schedule the delivers to number of machines the council requires at any given time. Mr Sussex says: “XMA deliver just the amount we want, when we want them, this takes away the need for expensive storage facilities and allows us to provide a just-in time refresh service to our customers. That flexibility is essential especially when we are expecting to refresh 300 + machines in a month for example.

“XMA also mange lease returns. When a lease runs out they will remove the old batch of hardware that we have refreshed and arrange everything with HP with regard to the return of hardware and lease finance. We don’t have to do any of that which takes the pressure away from us completely.”

The partnership between XMA and the Council has been a successful one but only happened after HP recommended XMA as its preferred supplier. Mr Sussex says: “At the beginning, XMA was a supplier we knew little about but it has been a very good
relationship. Since using XMA I would prefer partnering with them over using another HP partner or the HP Direct Service.

What was beneficial about working with XMA?

Single point of contact

Mr Sussex said: “With XMA, we get a single point of contact. Queries are responded to fast and efficiently. We have had situations where they can’t solve a problem but they quite often come up with a workable solution. That flexibility is very useful, in an ideal world, we would have longer lead times for projects but, in reality, we often only get seven to 10 days to supply a solution once internal funding has been secured.

Customer care

Mr Sussex added: “Sometimes a larger organisation is not prepared to go the extra mile for you. With XMA, you have the benefit of a big organisation but they also have the customer care ethos of a smaller company”. “For example, there have been a number of instances when pre-sales technical staff from XMA have given us suggestions for solutions that are significantly cheaper. So they have provided value to us in that way.”

Problem solvers

According to Mr Sussex, XMA staff have also worked with his own team on individual projects. He said: “Contract staff have mentored our staff on project work and that worked out really well. There have also been times when the company has helped solve complex problems for us.

“For example, when we originally set up the agreement with HP we wanted Cisco switches in our data centre but HP couldn’t deliver at that point. Instead, XMA supplied the switches but partnered with HP so they were delivered as part of our overall lease. It meant we could pay for everything together but we could only have the solution we wanted because of the service from XMA.”

“I feel strongly that the approach from XMA is that they are there to help the council – and that is what they do”

“XMA have provided significant value to us.”

XMA comes out on top

Ofsted issued a tender for the supply, implementation and ongoing managed support of a Microsoft Private Cloud solution with over 300TB storage, 500 CPU cores and 8TB RAM (plus a smaller platform at a second site). The requirement included fully-managed migration of approximately 300 production and test/dev systems to the new platform, while addressing their need for a number of secure network environments including a combined user acceptance testing environment and a Disaster recovery failover.

Hitachi scores “outstanding”

We recognised that Ofsted required a platform that provided significant computing resource and a highly resilient storage platform. In response, we proposed a Hitachi Unified Compute Platform (UCP) comprising automatically-tiered Hitachi Unified Storage (HUS) and CB500 blades based on the latest Intel Sandybridge processors. Core networking (based on Brocade VDX) was included, as was firewalling and load balancing using F5 Big IPs. We addressed the solution requirements in their entirety and provided training and migration services on top of hardware, software and extended managed support for the complete infrastructure stack.

As HDS’ largest public sector partner in the UK market, we recognised this as an ideal fit for the HDS Unified Compute Platform. This was an opportunity to introduce a disruptive yet constructive technology, despite the length of relationship with the incumbent technology partner. Our solution provided to Ofsted replaced the entire existing estate as it hurtled past the end of its economic life.

The migration process, which included virtualising over 100 legacy physical servers (including SQL and Exchange clusters), also required the migration of their on-premis datacentre to a secure remote datacentre, all without any business disruption.

Project success leads to opportunity

On completion of the Infrastructure Refresh project, Ofsted engaged with us to develop the platform further by extending the storage layer to a content platform. We are also involved in consulting on the effective use of its infrastructure to achieve delivery of its regulatory and statutory objectives.

XMA’s technical expertise has proved invaluable for helping Lincoln Minster School install a SAN and carry out a server virtualisation project which has given staff and students a much improved service.

“Having an impressive technical team on the end of the phone was very helpful.” That was the verdict of Simon Cornish, network manager at Lincoln Minster School, after XMA helped the school design and deliver a SAN installation and server virtualisation project. In fact, he attributed much of the final success of the project to the company’s ability to offer sound technical advice at every step of the way.

The solution was designed by XMA after the school decided to explore moving towards a modern virtualisation environment during a hardware refresh. Mr Cornish said: “We were refreshing our server infrastructure and we wanted to virtualise it. Previously our servers were old and tired and out of warranty. We knew virtualisation was the way IT was going but we needed help to move forward with the right solution.”

The entire project ran very smoothly. Members of the XMA team were happy to answer
questions about anything we wanted to know about. We were really impressed.

The school, which caters for 900 pupils across three sites, needed XMA’s help to make sure their plans could become an effective reality. Therefore, XMA designed a solution and installed a cost- effective SAN which enabled the school to reduce its server estate from 15 servers to 4.

Why virtual?

The benefits of virtualisation were clear to Lincoln Minster. Mr Cornish said: “This is the way IT is going. By cutting down our servers from fifteen to four, we have reduced our overheads dramatically and it has also made the management of our IT systems much easier as we only have one place to look at all the servers – rather than having to maintain each separately. Thanks to this project, we have refreshed hardware, our operating systems are up to date, we have more power and, generally, we now have in place a faster, more effective system than before.”

Support for the right solution

However, ensuring the school reaped the benefits of a virtualisation solution was not a foregone conclusion. Mr Cornish said: "We have our own technical team but finding people who were at the next level up was essential. One of my aims was to find a solution provider with good technical expertise.

“Today, both staff and students at Lincoln Minster are enjoying the advantages of XMA’s solution which has proved to be value-for-money, as well as reliable and scalable.”

“We were most impressed with XMA’s technical knowledge. From that point of view, it was absolutely brilliant. I couldn’t have asked for anything more at all. It was quickly apparent that XMA staff knew what they were doing and had the knowledge to help
us.”

A personalised solution

Another reason that Lincoln Minster chose XMA to deliver the solution was because the IT provider was happy to create a solution that was fitted to the school's requirements exactly. For example, the school had already chosen to use HP and Microsoft technology – so XMA ensured this preference was factored into the final design.

Mr Cornish said: “Our account manager made an effort to come and sit down with us and find out exactly what our issues were. By doing so, XMA could plan out exactly what we needed. Now we have a solution that fulfils our needs.”

The solution in action

Today, both staff and students at Lincoln Minster are enjoying the advantages of XMA’s solution which has proved to be value-for-money, as well as reliable and scalable. The system can also support much faster backup times and improved disaster recovery. The solution provides redundancy within the SAN solution through two fibre controllers to service the servers and data traffic and three high performance specification servers to manage data requests to the SAN from the school’s network. A storage server was also installed to backup all data from the main SAN.

Mr Cornish said: “Our storage is improved so the service we can offer our students is much better. What’s more, the staff know they can rely on the IT facilities. In the past we have had complaints about the systems performance. That was not an acceptable situation because if the computers are down, teachers cannot deliver lessons to the standard they want, which is a major problem for any modern school. Now we just don’t have these complaints coming in.”

A smooth implementation

He went on: “The entire project ran very smoothly. Members of the XMA team were happy to answer questions about anything we wanted to know about. We were really impressed. They knew their stuff and because of that we would absolutely use XMA again in the future.”

Bridging the divide with HPE

Addressing ever increasing data demands

The Windsor Forest Colleges Group is made up of three college campuses (Windsor, Langley and Egham) all managing different technologies and virtualisation software. Supporting IT for more than one campus and in different locations, presented challenges for the group; with too much physical infrastructure, inconsistent systems, poor service levels and time and resource intensive management.

HPE makes the grade

We worked with the Group to implement an identical 3-node Hyper-V cluster and DPM backup solution into each of the three sites. By integrated best of breed HPE servers and storage, the College gained three major components.

A production environment consisting of a three node Hyper-V cluster with 1024GB RAM and 70TB of shared storage per site that hosted each sites IT services and data, with spare capacity that allows for one site to be replicated to another to form a 3-way mutual Disaster Recovery environment.

A Microsoft System Centre DPM backup solution configured with 60TB usable storage at each site that
provides disk to disk backup for local services and data.

A 3-way mutual disaster recovery environment that allows virtual machines to be replicated between sites
allowing for failover of services should one site become unavailable.

As a result, each site is now able to work independently with local failover clustering and the ability to replicate virtual machines to another site for added resiliency using Hyper-V replica.

Streamlining print operations

The University of Warwick is one of the UK’s great success stories. In less than fifty years since being founded it has become one of the UK’s best universities, consistently at the top of UK league tables and rapidly climbing the international league tables of world class universities. The University has 29,301 students and staff using average annual print volumes of 25 million pages.

After being selected under the Crown Commercial Services RM3781 framework, XMA began working with the University to provide a fully managed print solution. Chris Wood, Printing Services Owner of the University commented “We chose XMA because we felt that they were the most flexible”.

The University had a mixed fleet of 3,800 devices encompassing MFD’s and Desktop Printers. XMA have rationalised these devices, reducing the fleet by 60%. As part of this rationalisation project, XMA also provided a wraparound managed service for the University’s legacy MFD and desktop printers including HP, Samsung and Ricoh devices. Now, staff and students use the Print Management solution across the University, accessed via Mifare smartcards.

The initial requirement was a mix of HP and Kyocera MFD’s coupled with SafeCom Pull Printing and job accounting software in order to provide accurate billing for cost recovery. The second phase of the project was a Document Management Project to digitise information for sharing around the University, which will reduce overall page’ volumes University wide.

Adam Williams, MPS Manager for XMA noted: “With the University we had to adopt a customer led and very fluid approach as each Department had differing print requirements to be supplied through the Kyocera fleet of products”.

Chris continued: “The key for us was to have one user interface across a vast fleet of devices so that we could have support information, documentation, FAQ’s, where there was a real continuity to it and ease of use”.

The fleet has also been supplied with SafeCom pull print management software to reduce costs and meet environmental targets. Users authenticate at the MFD using MiFare smartcard technology.

“The pull print has made a massive difference for us, cutting down on waste. We used to see enormous piles of waste in the recycling bin; we don’t see that anymore. Another massive area for us is mobile print and technologies. That gives our users the ability to send an attachment to a specific mobile print email address, and that attachment will then be sent to their print queue. Use of this has doubled since last term and we expect that to continue.”

Since the initial phases, XMA now work with Warwick University, who also offer their print room services to local businesses in the area. This has created a revenue stream for the University, alongside their £180,000 reduced print costs and tangible environmental savings. Craig Colledge, Print General Manager explained:

“SafeCom gives you financial reporting that we can go back to the Financial Directors and tell them exactly what the cost implications of printing in the University are”.