Gerald Eve - second case study
Leading firm of chartered surveyors and property consultants turns to Logicalis to create storage, backup, disaster recovery and training solution
Company Profile
Gerald Eve is a leading firm of UK chartered surveyors and property consultants. The company operates from its principal office in the West End of London and a regional network of sites throughout the UK. Gerald Eve, which has experts in all property sectors and surveying disciplines, has an international profile and often undertakes projects overseas.
Customer's Business Issues
Gerald Eve's business was potentially at risk because of its legacy back up and storage system that relied on ad hoc processes at each of its offices. The firm faced strict regulatory requirements, which require chartered surveyors' electronic records to be stored for seven years. As well as needing to consolidate back up and storage on a single system, Gerald Eve also wanted to put in place a disaster recovery strategy. It needed sufficient capacity on its Storage Area Network (SAN) to accommodate the growing demands of its users.
Gerald Eve always strives to understand its clients' businesses, their objectives and the economic climate in which they operate. Although it has specialists in IT and other business support disciplines, Gerald Eve wanted as many of its management team as possible to concentrate on delivering excellent services to its clients.
The company was interested in acquiring an automated system for efficient and scalable storage. There were large fluctuations in its business data and it faced the potential danger of running out of storage space. It was also becoming a business priority to separate processing from data, as well as to have more flexibility over upgrades. Gerald Eve wanted to minimise the security risks and inconvenience attached to holding all its data on a set of disks at each of its sites.
“We were relying on people in our various offices who didn't always understand why they were doing back ups and what it all means,” recalls Warren Stephen, IT technical director, Gerald Eve. “It was often the case that our back up regime was inconsistent and it wasn't centralised at all. It was also extremely time consuming and inefficient.”
The company needed not only to reduce data storage costs but also to speed up data processing and restoration. One mission critical operational area was the accounts system, which holds vital information about customers as well as dealing with standard procedures such as invoicing.
The Logicalis Solution
Logicalis' expertise resulted in the choice of an automated storage and back up solution using HP MSA1000 disk arrays, Legato NetWorker and an Overland Tape Library.
The project was implemented within a week of agreement by the customer and was operational a month later following staff training provided by Logicalis, which was a key element of the total solution.
“We had talked to four or five other companies excluding Logicalis and I'd nailed it down to two. Once I began talking to Logicalis I felt they were really trying to find out what it was that Gerald Eve wanted,” says Stephen.
Logicalis impressed Gerald Eve because its consultants made it clear that their customer would be managing the new technology and they had to choose something they wanted. “I found the Logicalis approach extremely reassuring and was influenced towards them by their independence,” says Stephen. “Logicalis was not trying to pour a solution down my throat, especially as I had got into that predicament with one of the other competing companies.”
Gerald Eve gained the security of vastly improved data processing time. “With our old system if the accounts system had crashed it would have taken two-to-three days to restore,” says Stephen. “Following the new implementation it only took 15-20 minutes to get the system running again.”
The company was able to have the new back up solution operational within a month, because the implementation was closely integrated with the training package. Logicalis arranged the training at its offices in a fully staged Legato environment.
“Continuity was maintained between the Logicalis staff responsible for the implementation and training phases,” says Stephen. “When we came back from the training everything made perfect sense. Sometimes you can return from training courses more confused than ever, but this did not happen with Logicalis”
Another aspect that attracted Gerald Eve was the attention Logicalis paid to its customer's future growth and the capacity of its SAN - right from the outset of the project. “Something that we considered was the ease of adding organically to the solution,” says Stephen.
Why Logicalis?
Gerald Eve now has a highly-scalable, reliable storage environment where its key business data is secure. The system also has the flexibility to process large volumes of data to meet the needs of a fluctuating business base, and the quicker processing times have proved a major cost saving benefit.
