Spicers
With the help of Logicalis, Spicers has improved systems uptime and IT support across its European operations and reduced costs by £150,000 per year
Company Profile
Spicers is the largest wholesaler of office products in Europe . The group has operations in France , Spain , Germany , Italy , and the UK and Ireland.
Customer's Business Issues
Spicers wanted to consolidate its European IT infrastructure in the UK site, and implement a scalable and robust system. The company's objectives were to increase storage, improve business continuity and disaster recovery, and lower support costs.
Bob Dalby, European operations manager, Spicers, says: “In terms of managing IT systems, we have operated as a collection of companies in which every country was, to a large degree, independent and autonomous.”
Each of Spicers' five European operations had the freedom to implement whatever suited their operations. This disparate use of IT systems a mix of legacy and newer systems made support complex, creating the need for a large and varied pool of skills.
“Managing disparate systems put an unnecessary strain on our internal resources. We wanted to improve IT support and share our resources more effectively to reduce this duplication of effort,” says Dalby. “We are not an IT company, we're an office products wholesaler, and so we have a limited IT budget. It is difficult to find and recruit the resources that have the skills to manage legacy systems. By standardising our technology, we could also standardise our required skill set.”
The Logicalis Solution
Spicers worked closely with Logicalis to build an IT roadmap and centralise its IT infrastructure for the entire European operations to one campus. With Logicalis' support, Spicers has started a complete technology refresh, implementing future-proof and cost-effective technology including a new storage solution, servers, and the creation of a data-replicated site to provide additional resilience.
Previously, Spicers operated its main logistics system on a mix of 14 servers. To improve performance and reduce the amount of servers needed for the European operation, Logicalis standardised Spicers' infrastructure with a four-way cluster of HP-UX rp3440-4 servers. Logicalis also deployed an HP BladeSystem for an infrastructure that was more flexible and efficient.
The Logicalis solution provided high availability and scalability, while reducing the amount of servers Spicers operates from 14 to seven. Dalby says: “We gained four times as much power as the combined machines that we replaced.” By improving support quality and reducing server infrastructure, Spicers has saved £150,000 per year in maintenance costs alone. For improved business continuity and storage management, Spicers also built two data centres that are located within the same campus grounds in Cambridgeshire , UK . The split-site date centre replicates information for the entire European operations in real time.
The HP EVA3000 data centre storage solution was chosen for its high performance, high capacity and high availability. The EVA3000 – with MSL6060 Enterprise Tape Library and MSL6030 Tape Library – gives improved storage utilisation and scalability, and provides seamless capacity expansion, data replication and simplified storage management.
Why Logicalis?
One of the additional benefits for the company has been time savings. “Our operations team used to complete backups on every server, every night.
As we expanded and increased our servers, this had become too time consuming. Using HP EVA3000, coupled with the tape library solutions, we have automated this process, and reduced our back-up times by more than 50 per cent.”
Logicalis and Spicers have built a strong and productive relationship. Dalby says: “Logicalis has worked exceptionally well with us to ensure a future-proof solution that will respond to our evolving needs, and has guided us during a key time of change.
We've benefited from a huge level of expertise from Logicalis' dedicated project team that we could never have drawn upon internally.”
