“We’ve found that with virtualisation technology, IT support can be a lot more responsive to the end users.”


Andy Seaman, head of service delivery, Burges Salmon


The firm chose HP to provide a new converged infrastructure for the new building, moving to a virtualised solution based on HP BladeSystem with ProLiant BL490 and BL685c G6 server blades running VMware vSphere 4. To improve utilisation of their servers, Burges Salmon aimed to improve manageability and performance, as well as realising cost savings. It worked with Commercial IT Services, an HP partner, to plan and execute the move and infrastructure upgrade.


Low-risk move


Burges Salmon needed to ensure continuity of service during the move to the new building. It decided to use a co-location site, which would become a temporary staging post for the move, and then would eventually become the firm’s disaster recovery site. This approach minimised any risk involved in moving to the new building. The firm also sought to implement a new IT infrastructure that would speed up the relocation – but also one that would reduce complexity, resource requirements and costs across the organisation for years to come.


Commercial IT Services worked closely with Burges Salmon to manage the complexities and challenges of the project, and to ensure there was minimum disruption to the business. With multiple partners involved, the project management, technical and organisational skills of Commercial’s staff ensured that everything ran smoothly.


Burges Salmon wanted a solution that aimed to improve manageability and performance throughout the organisation – with technology that would contribute to both cost savings in energy usage and management. Commercial IT recommended the firm chose the HP Converged Infrastructure for its common, modular architecture and portfolio of standards-based technologies that would specifically solve the challenges proposed by Burges Salmon.


The firm selected a VMware vSphere environment based on HP BladeSystem, HP StorageWorks P4500 and HP FlexFabric. “The decision was made as we were moving to the new building that we’d need to look at power consumption and some of the latest technologies, as well as a reduction of infrastructure overheads, so we chose a virtualised environment for most of our servers,” says Seaman.


“This will be using VMware vSphere 4 running across two HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosures at the new building and two at the co-location site, each with two redundant HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 10 Gb Ethernet modules for local failover. These are backed up with ten HP StorageWorks P4500 Storage Area Network (SAN) nodes at each of the two locations.”


Burges Salmon also chose the HP c-Class BL490c and BL685c blade servers to combine energy efficient compute power and high density memory for maximum virtual machine performance. The HP StorageWorks P4500 SAN also gives Burges Salmon a cost-effective, highly available storage solution, which provides scalable performance as its business needs grow. The P4500 SAN is coupled with VMware Site Recovery Manager, which accelerates and ensures successful recovery by automating the recovery process and eliminating the complexity of recovery plans.


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