Case Studies
Use the following links to see examples of recent Serval Projects.
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Bales Worldwide Limited
Remote hosting with business continuity service
Background
Bales Worldwide is a growing tour operator with a long and successful history. Their business is based on a very high standard of service and so they require particularly reliable infrastructure and IT support.
Serval Systems supplied Bales with systems support for their PC based IT environment for many years. In 2002 Bales opted to relocate all IT equipment to our hosting centre at East Grinstead.
Since that date all of Bales IT systems have been operated in a remote thin client environment.
The Serval Solution
Data Backbone
The service is provided over a 2 megabit link between Bales House and Serval Systems.
Data Centre
A Citrix farm and back office servers are in place and are being continually upgraded to provide a safe and secure environment for Bales’s data and computer services. All maintenance and support can take place remotely from the Bales operation without inconvenience to the Bales business.
All of the Bales servers benefit from being located in a proper secure, cooled computer room, with a standby generator and a managed backup service.
Disaster Recovery
Bales have access to Serval’s disaster recovery suite. Should an incident prevent access to their offices they would send key staff to continue operations on the hosted servers.
Conclusion
Bales Worldwide have selected to outsource all of their IT services to Serval Systems. This has resulted in Bales being able to concentrate on their core business and utilise the space previously used by servers for expanded operations.
Bales also benefit from improved support as their systems are constantly maintained and monitored by our support team.
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Yes Car Credit
A Low maintainance multi site solution
Background
YCC is the trading name of Direct Auto Finance Limited, which itself is a subsidiary of Provident Financial plc. YCC was established in 1997 and is now widely regarded as the market leader in the supply of alternative finance and motor vehicles in the UK.
YCC employs 1300 staff in 30 locations and has an annual turnover of approximately £280 million.
Serval Systems was initially introduced to Yes Car Credit to solve an immediate data communications problem between head office and the data centre in Cardiff.
Following this Serval helped Yes Car Credit design and implement an IT infrastructure to take the business forward from its base of 250 staff and 5 branches in 1999 to a 30 branch nationwide operation by 2002 with 1200 staff. All this was achieved whilst maintaining only 2-3 internal IT staff with support from the Serval team.
The Serval Solution
Data Backbone
Core to the business success was central access to sales and financial data so the first project was to provide the branch and data centre with a resilient secure data network maintained by Serval systems. This ATM based system was designed to expand and encompass the businesses ambitious growth plans.
Data Centre
A Citrix farm was established in the data centre by Serval at Cardiff giving fast access to the back end ISeries and Windows Server based data. This would eventually consist of a 9 server Citrix farm plus backend data and domain controllers. This was based on IBM high density rack mounted dual processor servers.
Branch Locations
In existing branches PC workgroup networks had been installed with a standalone server at each location. Even with the limited number of installations at that time this caused a constant support requirement. Hardware reliability, user error and local system interference were exacerbated by occasional theft. Local branch staff would often fail to understand the requirement to maintain tape backups of data.
Each branch location was supplied with 10 Wyse 1200LE thin client terminals giving the users a Microsoft Windows experience with access to the required applications via the data centre. The users were now in an environment with almost no desktop failures and where they could not degrade the operation of the IT equipment. Additionally 3 Printers were located at each branch complete with vendor maintenance contracts.
This solution virtually removed the need for onsite branch support. The Wyse Terminals now 5 years old should have a trouble free life of at least 5 more years with server driven Windows and application upgrades.
In addition to these major savings it was then possible to pre-configure and then install a branch in one day, reducing the cost of expansion.
Head Office solution
Following the successful branch implementation of this thin client environment the decision was made to roll out the benefits to head office. In an extension to the existing farm 3 IBM Blade centre chassis were populated with 15 blade servers and a Citrix environment rolled out using existing PC and Wyse 1200LE terminals.
Conclusion
YCC in partnership with Serval Systems Limited made an informed decision to implement an IT strategy which was able to support the business growth without a corresponding increase in support staff. The benefits of the investment has undoubted been recouped many times over and yet there is no reason why the solution should not continue to deliver desktop services with low overhead for the foreseeable future.
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Wynne Baxter Solicitors
Application integration and disaster recovery solution
Background
Wynne Baxter had a requirement to reorganise the existing IT services to provide a more reliable and cost effective solution. With an ageing PC based solution involving NT4 backup domain controllers the cost of desktop support was starting to spiral out of control.
In addition there was a planned requirement to roll out digital dictation to all four offices.
A plan was created that allowed for centralisation of all data to the head Office at Brighton. These services are to be backed up by a disaster recovery location in Lewes.
The Serval Solution
Data Backbone
The business has great faith in their existing leased line services and so these remained in place. With upgrades to 256K organised for the remote offices. To ensure continuity of service ISDN backup lines are provided for at each location.
Data Centre
A Citrix farm was established in a data centre at Brighton together with a new Windows 2003 domain and mail services. Core business applications together with Bighand digital dictation servers were then added.
Branch Locations
The remote locations were then equipped with XP embedded Wyse thin client devices. These had drivers and modifications developed in association with Bighand and Wyse which allowed the use of Total Speech digital dictation flexibly across any location. The speech files are stored centrally with all Wynne Baxter’s data.
Disaster Recovery
Building on the technologies put in place the next step was to create a disaster recovery location. This allows a relatively simple switch over to a secondary set of Citrix servers. These provide access to the alternative mail and SQL servers which are replicated using Neverfail.
Conclusion
The updated systems have allowed this client to continue to move forward without increasing the IT support head count. New and improved applications have been provided across the business. Solicitors who meet clients at various offices can now sign on and work seamlessly at any location and indeed from home.
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