Lagan Holdings
Working in consultation with Novosco, Lagan Group decided to centralise servers and take small justifiable steps towards a virtualised IT infrastructure. Virtualisation has now been implemented throughout the group with servers reduced from 25 to 5 hosts. EMC Celerra & VMware Site Recovery Manager was also installed to offer enhanced and automated disaster recovery.
Founded almost 50 years ago, Lagan Holdings Limited are a Construction Group with a combined turnover of £450m. Operating globally with strong markets in Ireland, UK, the Caribbean and Asia Pacific, Lagan Holdings consists of five separate companies including Lagan Group, Cement Group, Brick, Development and Lagan Homes.
The IT infrastructure / systems within Lagan Holdings are managed centrally at Lagan Group by an IT team of six staff. This central IT structure supports the IT requirements of over 20 subsidiaries, 50+ sites and 1350 IT users consisting of engineers, consultants etc. As a means of support for the IT team and to offer high level consultation for major IT projects, Novosco has been the ‘trusted partner’ for Lagan since 2003.
Before Virtualisation
Prior to implementing virtualisation, Lagan Holdings had a distributed IT site model with most sites featuring dedicated servers. This created many IT challenges such as high server costs per site, slow server provisioning of six weeks and high maintenance costs. There was also a limited business continuity/disaster recovery plan consisting of local manual site back-ups and a lengthy recovery time of up to five days. This created delays and costly impacts on construction projects, quality procedures and business operations.
Staged Virtualisation
Using VMware technology for server virtualisation, Lagan decided to roll-out virtualisation. Servers were reaching end-of-life, so rather than replace, Lagan decided to roll-out virtualisation in stages. VMware technology was the chosen technology for server virtualisation and an EMC SAN (Storage Area Network) was also implemented. Within three months, Servers were reduced from 25 to five hosts plus failover, and centralised to two core locations. The project cost less than 50% of the cost of a non virtualised approach.
Applications Virtualised
Applications virtualised include SQL, Citrix, Microsoft Exchange, Oracle, Linux, OCS, SharePoint, Sage and ERP.
EMC Celerra & VMware Site Recovery Manager
Lagan deployed EMC Celerra SAN technology to replicate the virtual machine data between the two site locations. To further capitalise on VMware & EMC infrastructure now in place, Lagan then opted in 2008 to install VMware ‘Site Recovery Manager’ (SRM). This was the first implementation of its kind in Ireland and offered Lagan enhanced and automated disaster recovery procedures in the event of a site failure.
EMC storage and VMware SRM combined, provide unique integration benefits such as the automation of complex DR run book scenarios and the ability to run full site DR tests with zero production impact. EMC Celerra also provides a VMware virtual centre plug-in, which automates the failback process and is currently not available from any other platform.
With this system, Lagan now has an active platform distributed across two physical sites, where each site performs the recovery functions for the other.