We’re normally very busy working for customers providing them with solutions to their IT issues and problems, but we occasionally find the time to share some good news. Here’s a selection:
MARK OF QUALITY FOR LOCAL IT SUPPLIER
A West Midlands IT company has secured a quality award for the fifth year running. The Approved ICT Supplier status and use of the Quality Mark logo is awarded by the UK IT Association (UKITA) – the trade association that represents IT, digital media and internet-related businesses in the UK.
Read the full press release on our Approved ICT Supplier status...
IT COMPANY SETS ITS SIGHTS ON CARBON REDUCTION
A West Midlands IT company is helping their customers with carbon reduction by
transferring all their hosting to a carbon neutral data centre. This will help
customers meet their carbon reduction targets.
Read the full press release on our carbon neutral hosting facility...
WOMBOURNE BUSINESSMAN CELEBRATES 30 YEARS IN IT
Nigel Mills, managing director of Wombourne IT
company, Micro-Business Maintenance Ltd, celebrates
working in the IT industry for 30 years.
“Times are changing”, Nigel says “and databases have
become valued in ways I never thought they would.
I’m celebrating my 30 years in IT by offering free
data security advice to local firms. There’s no fee
– all they need to do is ring us and we’ll talk them
through the security options available.”
Over
the years Nigel has experienced first-hand the
changes in the IT sector. He believes the biggest
issue facing businesses at present is security and
encryption of company data. The mobility of staff
means data is leaving company premises on laptops
and data sticks and it’s important to ensure the
data is secure. Recent incidents of stolen laptops
containing highly confidential personal information
show just how vulnerable organisations of any size
are. However, solutions are available for those
companies who want to protect their data.
Nigel Mills is one of the original members of the UK
IT Association (UKITA) which was set up in 1998, and
his company is a Microsoft Partner and a Sage
dealer. They provide a range of services including
virtual servers, online back up services, database
design and management and computer maintenance.
Nigel started his IT career as a computer
operator on an ICL 2903 computer. He worked as a
programmer for engineering and manufacturing
companies before setting up his own company in 1989.
He moved to his current offices in Wombourne in 1991
and provides IT support to businesses of all sizes.
One of our largest customer faced the challenge
of providing high-speed access to their files and
SQL databases no-matter which site the users were
working at. We built a VPN using our Inter
Linx
gateway server technology to link the five sites.
Each branch office site was given a small Windows
server. Windows file replication was used to hold a
live version of the organisation's file set on each
branch server. Users at the branches were able to
have instanteneous access to their files from the
local server whilst new files and changes were
replicated seamlessly across the entire
organisation.
Having a small local server
also meant that the branch office sites could
continue to work no-matter what happened to the rest
of the organisation. Finally, data backup was
managed centrally at the head office.
The new
infrastructure produced a marked increase in staff
performance in the remote offices and branch
managers were delighted with the solution.
We needed to upgrade our own virtualisation
infrastructure in our Internet data centre in-order
to cope with demand and to facilitate new services.
The solution needed to have ultra-high speed shared
storage to enable live migration of running virtual
machines between cluster nodes.
Citrix
XenServer offered everything that we needed so we
built our infrastructure around that. Performance is
critical when it comes to storage area networking so
we opted for 10Gbit/s (10,000Mbit/s) networking
using Hewlett Packard switches and 10Gbit/s network
cards from Chelsio. Our primary storage is
implemented on standard HP ProLiant server hardware
running Linux and Chelsio's own iSCSI software. We
were the first company to deploy the latest version
of XenServer using Chelsio equipment.
Performance and reliability of the platform is
excellent and it was risen to every challenging
requirement we have thrown at it.
We continue
to add storage and virtualisation nodes as demand
increases. This virtualisation environment has
become the cornerstone of our on-line services
offerings.
A long standing customer of ours is a small
electricity supplier. Their old bill production
system, written by us in the late 90's, was
beginning to show its age. The company wanted a new
bill production system capable of producing
eletricity bills that conformed to the BS8463
utility billing standard. They had also grown to be
the fifth largest electricity company in the UK and
needed a solution that could produce bills more
quickly and make them available not only on paper
but also online and as Email attachments. We worked
with their billing team and mailing company to
implement a system that did just that.
The
system uses XML stylesheets to build bills on-demand
or in batches from data stored in SQL tables.
Monthly bill runs are time-critical so it was
important to build these complex documents quickly
enough to drive the mailing company's high volume
printers. The project delivered on that goal and now
is responsible for billing hundreds of thousands of
customers each month.
The system runs as a
hosted service from our Internet data centre.
Microsoft Small Business Server is a great
product on which to run your business. A local
charity asked us for a cost-effective solution to
unify their files, centralise their Email and
control their Internet access.
We built a
solution based around Microsoft Small Business
Server running on a Hewlett Packard ProLiant server
with one of our Inter
Linx gateway servers
monitoring user activity and protecting the network.
The solution was extremely cost-effective and has
delivered excellent reliability and functionality.
This particular organisation especially enjoys
access to their mailboxes on their smartphones.
This kind of solution is typical of what we
provide day-in and day-out.
A multi-site consultancy company was interested
in exploring the potential for Microsoft Office
Sharepoint Services (MOSS) in their business to help
them improve their document management and improve
their online colaboration with their customers.
As a Microsoft Service Provider, we were able to
build a virtual Sharepoint server in our data centre
and rent the software to them for the period of
their evaluation. The server was connected with a
VPN tunnel to their head office to enable
integration into their on-site resources. Customers
were able to login to colaboration sites related to
their own projects so that they could watch and
interact with the work being done by the
consultancy. The consultants themselves were able to
upload documents and formally manage their changes
over time.
The evaluation gave the customer a
valuable insight into Sharepoint and online
colaboration systems in general. It was also very
cost effective as the software was rented to them
just for the time they needed it and the hardware
was virtual.
