A common problem faced by expanding businesses is the need for a faster, more efficient IT infrastructure.

Guildford based Thomson Ecology, the UK’s leading ecological consultants, has become our latest success story and a perfect example of a growing business which has seen fantastic results from adopting the latest ‘virtualised’ green technology.

Since inception in 2004, Thomson Ecology has enjoyed significant business growth and now employs over 100 people. This has placed increased demand on the company’s existing IT infrastructure. Quick to avert a potential problem, the directors of Thomson Ecology and Paul Bussey, information systems manager looked to us to advise on an appropriate solution.

“We are a young, vibrant business with three remote offices and we carry out numerous scientific surveys on site in remote locations. As workloads increased it became even more important that our IT system was 100% reliable.” Explains Paul.

After evaluating the needs of Thomson Ecology, we proposed a new virtualised system, creating a framework that allows more than one computer system to run on the same computer hardware. Implementing this ‘green’ technology can reduce electricity consumption as well as the cost of hardware and necessary floor space. At the same time, virtualisation simplifies the difficult task of implementing disaster recovery plans.

In Thomson Ecology’s case, they had just outgrown their existing infrastructure. With more staff, larger volumes of data to process and manage, the system became slow and unstable. Maintenance time increased which resulted in more downtime. At Computer Strategies, we believe this is just unacceptable in such a busy commercial environment.

Our solution was to replace the five existing servers with two VMWare Servers, a flexible hosted virtualisation platform which creates access to up to 8 virtual servers. The system is dynamic and extra RAM and disk space can be assigned as and when it is needed.

“Tony and his team managed to transfer all our existing data and get the new system up and running with just one hour of planned downtime which is incredible given the task in hand.”

“We now have a reliable, future proof system which can grow as we do. We have reduced our energy consumption and improved our operating efficiency. For example, staff in the field carrying out a protected species survey can make much better use of mobile technology to access the network and relay data much quicker than previously. Plus, we can trial new software programmes in hours rather than days as it used to take before.” Says Paul.