Brita is keen on energy efficient technologies and strives to reduce their impact on the environment.  Every aspect of the company is scrutinised to ensure it is being as energy efficient as possible, this extends to the IT Infrastructure and therefore the reduction in power, space and carbon creating technologies was a further requirement of the solution.

The Situation

Brita had upwards of 25 servers based in their UK headquarters in Bicester.  Although their core networking infrastructure is of a high specification due to the existing Cisco 4500 and edge switches their server estate was ageing with some servers over 7 years old.

Due to the amount of servers and hardware Brita’s IT Support team had their hands full in managing and maintaining service to the company.  The IT Department’s drive was to be more efficient and do more with less. The reduction in complexity of the network was a key driver for this project as well as the ability to provision new services for the business quickly with no effect on any other applications.

The expense and scale of Business Continuity is an issue for all companies, Brita’s view was that as part of this project they wanted to enhance their ability to continue to work if faced with a severe interruption at their installation in Bicester.  To that end the proposed solution would have to provide robust replication and high availability services as well as meeting the requirements already stated.

After a period of consultation with Axispoint, Brita opted for a full data centre solution based on NetApp’s FAS series SAN, VMware’s vSphere 4.0 plus ESXi 4.0 hosts.   This would enable Brita to reduce physical servers, reduce power consumption, reduce complexity but increase performance, agility, and availability.

The Solution

Having been involved with Brita since 2003 our team had a detailed understanding of their infrastructure and the potential issues that would surface when implementing such a solution.

Working in close co-operation with Ryan Jarvis, Brita’s IT Manager a detailed Scope of Works was created that was used to help everyone within the business understand the objectives and deliverables of the project.

Axispoint’s project management team was involved at an early stage as we knew that for this project to be successful all of the moving parts needed close management and had to be closely monitored.

A key part of Axispoint’s successful delivery methodology is to engage its Project Managers early in the pre-sales process so that the transition from Sales to Delivery is seamless.  Our delivery team can then more easily deliver to our clients what was originally specified in the pre-sales process.

The solution itself comprised of:

1. NetApp FAS2020 fully populated with SAS drives using NetApp’s industry leading WAFL technology and their Data ONTAP operating system, this combined with RAID6 performance ensures that Brita can migrate its Line of Business applications into the datacentre without fear of performance issues.
2. VMware’s vSphere solution using ESXi 4.0 and vCentre to provide Brita with:
3. Multi-vendor OS Virtual Machines
4. High Availability.
5. Fault Tolerance.
6. Distributed Power Management.
7. On demand computing resources.
8. Cisco 3750 Ethernet Switch adding heavy duty iSCSI switching & scalability as well as the ability to provision virtual networks across to the core infrastructure.

The key to a successful implementation is communication.  The Project Initiation Document (PID) and the Project Kick-off meeting were critical to the project staying on track, after that it was the daily communiqué’s that kept both Brita and the delivery team completely up to date with what was going on.  At no point in the project was anyone unaware of the current status and any risks that had arisen, we were therefore able to mitigate a risk before it then became an issue.

The collaboration between Ryan, his team and Axispoint’s delivery team was a further factor in the project’s success.  It was essential that knowledge of the solution and its abilities was transferred over as the project progressed; this meant that at the point of project completion Brita’s IT Department were in full control of the data centre and were able to manage it and expand it as required.