Executive summary

Challenge: In response to changing market conditions, FSL developed a software-as-a-service solution. This meant that, in addition to selling software, they now also provide hosting services for their app portfolio and needed to improve the flexibiltiy and scability of its IT environment.

Solution: Claranet worked with FSL to design and implement a fully managed solution, running on IBM System x3550 servers with a dedicated storage area network (SAN).

Result: With its new platform, FSL has gained the flexibility it needs to meet the changing demands of a growing client base and to guarantee high levels of customer service.

The challenge

Founded as an independent software vendor (ISV), FSL has developed a range of innovative applications for investment management and taxation. Changing market trends, however, have driven an increase in the demand for more innovative service delivery models.

“What we have seen recently is that more and more companies are moving away from the traditional model of simply buying software and then installing it on their own systems,” remarked Joe Hughes, Senior Technical Consultant at Financial Software Limited. “We realised that one way to help our customers maximise efficiencies was to broaden the scope of our service offerings and develop a software-as-a-service [SaaS] solution. Now, in addition
to selling software, we also provide hosting services for our application portfolio.”

Response to FSL’s new service offerings has been impressive, and the company realised that if it was to maintain the high levels of service that customers had come to expect, it needed to improve the scalability and flexibility of its existing IT environment.

The solution

Claranet worked with FSL to design and implement a fully managed solution, running on IBM System x3550 servers with a dedicated storage area network (SAN). Claranet began by converting FSL’s physical architecture to a virtual environment, using VMware vSphere.

As the first operating system specifically designed for virtual deployments, vSphere transforms physical hardware into a shared, virtualised environment that can scale to meet dynamic workloads on demand. Using the ESXi hypervisor architecture included in VMware vSphere 5, Claranet partitioned a large number of virtual machines on six IBM System x servers.

The company also established a dual-site configuration for the environment, hosting FSL’s main production systems at its primary data centre, which is located within the IBM Business Continuity and Resiliency Services facility in Chelmsford, Essex. A second virtual platform was built at another Claranet data centre in Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire, and will provide disaster recovery capabilities in the event of system downtime.

IBM System x3550 servers deliver high availability and scalability, providing an efficient, secure base for FSL’s private environment. Multiple System x3550 servers are used to run
the company’s production systems, with an equivalent number of servers being housed in Claranet’s second data centre and used for disaster recovery.

To provide failover capabilities between the two hosting sites, Claranet is using VMware Site Recovery Manager. This disaster recovery solution leverages vSphere Replication to deliver simple and powerful replication of applications to Claranet’s secondary data centre, along with fully automated site recovery and migration.

“The new environment has massively reduced risk for us as a company,” noted Hughes. “As our applications on the virtual machines can be automatically moved from one ESXi host to
another, it doesn’t matter if a physical server fails. In the highly unlikely event that the main data centre goes down entirely, VMware Site Recovery Manager will provide automatic failover to a second data centre. This will allow us to get our systems back up and running in just minutes, compared to the days it would have taken to recover our data from tape storage in the past. In this way, we can almost completely eliminate downtime for our clients.”

The result

With its new platform, FSL has gained the flexibility it needs to meet the changing demands of a growing client base and to guarantee high levels of customer service. IBM System x3550 servers provide high levels of scalability, making them ideal for consolidating large numbers of virtual machines onto a single server, and for virtualising the large databases and mission-critical workloads that FSL hosts for its customers.

“It is much quicker and easier for us to add more resources as we need them, which is critical to us as we continue to grow and provide hosted application services for more clients,” Hughes continued. “Our applications are highly customised, which means that every time we develop a new version of a particular application, we have to provision a new server for testing and development, as well as a standalone production environment. In the past, it would take us up to three weeks to provision new hosted application environments on our physical servers. Now, we can get an application up and running in under two hours.”

The solution that Claranet has developed for us has absolutely delivered on these requirements, and allows us to provide better service to our clients at a lower cost, helping to boost our competitive edge.”

Imran Khan
Managing Director at FSL

Imran Khan, Managing Director of Financial Software Limited, concluded: “When we started this project, we had two main requirements: we were looking for a solution that would enable us to rapidly scale production to meet changing demand and that would guarantee near-constant uptime for our operations. The solution that Claranet has developed for us has absolutely delivered on these requirements, and allows us to provide better service to our clients at a lower cost, helping to boost our competitive edge.”

About FSL

Financial Software Limited (FSL) is a leading financial software company that has supported clients in the UK financial markets for over 16 years. FSL currently delivers its applications and services to more than 75 clients, who range from some of the UK’s largest financial institutions to smaller investment management funds and banks.

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Executive summary

Challenge: The key challenge was to move BLM’s core infrastructure to a more secure and optimised data centre location, where it could be effectively and securely managed, whilst providing space for rapid expansion.

Solution: Claranet moved BLM’s critical business applications to a high-availability dedicated environment built on the VMware platform split between two data centres, with automated failover between the two sites for Disaster Recovery purposes.

Result: By moving its core IT infrastructure to Claranet onVMware, BLM has been able to support business growth while enabling the rapid launch of new business services.

The challenge

The key objective for BLM was to move its core infrastructure to a more secure and optimised data centre location, where it could be effectively and securely managed, whilst providing space for rapid expansion.

Darren Broughton, Infrastructure Manager at BLM explained:

“As we continued to grow in size, it became clear that our on-premises IT hosting facilities were no longer suitable. We began to experience challenges in simply maintaining the infrastructure. Over the last few years we have several significant outages, generally as a result of power supply or air conditioning failures. It became very clear that we were spending too much time and resource on maintaining our ageing environment.”

Not only was BLM’s IT system held back by costs, but the physical size of the server rooms was also becoming an issue. Additionally, the business was looking at launching a new Document Management System (DMS) which would be used by the entire company. Rather than go through the costly rigmarole of investing in and installing further physical infrastructure the IT department decided to look for a more cost-effective solution:

“We wanted to increase the speed of our system and reduce the administrative burden of setting up new servers and applications for the DMS. We needed IT to be the business enabler, but our old IT infrastructure was a cost drain and not flexible enough for us to help the business to grow,” continued Broughton.

Also important to BLM was the ability to comprehensively protect all its critical applications and data in a flexible and safe environment. The limited physical space at the firm’s offices meant that providing a disaster recovery (DR) environment in-house, whilst also meeting the rapid expansion requirements, was simply not an option.

The solution

In order to meet BLM’s needs, the firm’s IT team embarked on a server migration project in partnership with managed services provider Claranet. This saw the firm’s critical business applications migrated to a high-availability dedicated environment, built on the VMware platform at Claranet’s data centres in Essex and Hertfordshire.

BLM’s IT team looked into five managed services providers: “Claranet proved to be the most flexible, offering a design with VMware that was built exactly as per our specification
and requirement.”

Having a hands-on team at Claranet took away a lot of the administration of setting up a new environment and because our existing infrastructure was already virtualised, it was very easy to migrate the virtual machines over to the new locations.”

Darren Broughton
Infrastructure Manager at BLM

Key to the migration process was offering BLM’s entire staff access to the newly deployed DMS application, which the firm’s lawyers and technical experts rely on for the file sharing and electronic storage of critical documents.

BLM is now running a high availability platform, split between two data centres, with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) playing an integral part in enabling automated failover between the two sites for DR purposes.

Since this migration, both Claranet sites have been added to BLM’s network so that the IT team can migrate applications seamlessly from their on-premises platform to their dedicated platform without intervention from Claranet. The virtualisation of servers both at BLM and at Claranet has enabled a smooth integration between the two environments and the scaling required.

The result

By moving its core IT infrastructure to Claranet on VMware, BLM has been able to support business growth while enabling the rapid launch of new business services.

“Previously we would need to spend time monitoring and maintaining our IT environment, but now, we can respond much more quickly to business demands from our lawyers, meaning we’re providing a better service to BLM’s clients. And when we do need more infrastructure, we can simply request additional memory and storage from Claranet, or spin up new VMware hosts in accordance with business demand, rather than manually installing more servers in our limited on-premise locations.

BLM has also been able to create a formal Disaster Recovery strategy, protecting the workloads and applications in an automated way to ensure a seamless recovery using VMware’s SRM component. “With Claranet’s help we have developed a hybrid solution between our on-premises site and Claranet’s data centres. Adding some legacy hardware and public cloud platforms to our network means our core business applications are now virtually risk-free of outages and centrally managed. This cutting edge capability is delivered from new applications that we can implement quickly and confidently on the platform.”

About BLM

BLM is a leading risk and insurance law firm with head offices in Manchester and London, UK. The firm has a workforce of over 1,600 people, spread over nine offices in the UK and Ireland.

A fast growing law firm, BLM has experienced continual growth over the past 15 years, tripling its workforce as well as nearly doubling the number of offices across the UK. This rapid growth and physical expansion led to an increasingly complex IT infrastructure – and in turn a higher OPEX – needed to run the firm’s key business applications, products and services, as well as the day-to-day office operations of BLM’s lawyers.

Download full case study

Executive summary

Challenge: The key challenge was to move BLM’s core infrastructure to a more secure and optimised data centre location, where it could be effectively and securely managed, whilst providing space for rapid expansion.

Solution: Claranet moved BLM’s critical business applications to a high-availability dedicated environment built on the VMware platform split between two data centres, with automated failover between the two sites for Disaster Recovery purposes.

Result: By moving its core IT infrastructure to Claranet onVMware, BLM has been able to support business growth while enabling the rapid launch of new business services.

The challenge

The key objective for BLM was to move its core infrastructure to a more secure and optimised data centre location, where it could be effectively and securely managed, whilst providing space for rapid expansion.

Darren Broughton, Infrastructure Manager at BLM explained:

“As we continued to grow in size, it became clear that our on-premises IT hosting facilities were no longer suitable. We began to experience challenges in simply maintaining the infrastructure. Over the last few years we have several significant outages, generally as a result of power supply or air conditioning failures. It became very clear that we were spending too much time and resource on maintaining our ageing environment.”

Not only was BLM’s IT system held back by costs, but the physical size of the server rooms was also becoming an issue. Additionally, the business was looking at launching a new Document Management System (DMS) which would be used by the entire company. Rather than go through the costly rigmarole of investing in and installing further physical infrastructure the IT department decided to look for a more cost-effective solution:

“We wanted to increase the speed of our system and reduce the administrative burden of setting up new servers and applications for the DMS. We needed IT to be the business enabler, but our old IT infrastructure was a cost drain and not flexible enough for us to help the business to grow,” continued Broughton.

Also important to BLM was the ability to comprehensively protect all its critical applications and data in a flexible and safe environment. The limited physical space at the firm’s offices meant that providing a disaster recovery (DR) environment in-house, whilst also meeting the rapid expansion requirements, was simply not an option.

The solution

In order to meet BLM’s needs, the firm’s IT team embarked on a server migration project in partnership with managed services provider Claranet. This saw the firm’s critical business applications migrated to a high-availability dedicated environment, built on the VMware platform at Claranet’s data centres in Essex and Hertfordshire.

BLM’s IT team looked into five managed services providers: “Claranet proved to be the most flexible, offering a design with VMware that was built exactly as per our specification
and requirement.”

Having a hands-on team at Claranet took away a lot of the administration of setting up a new environment and because our existing infrastructure was already virtualised, it was very easy to migrate the virtual machines over to the new locations.”

Darren Broughton
Infrastructure Manager at BLM

Key to the migration process was offering BLM’s entire staff access to the newly deployed DMS application, which the firm’s lawyers and technical experts rely on for the file sharing and electronic storage of critical documents.

BLM is now running a high availability platform, split between two data centres, with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) playing an integral part in enabling automated failover between the two sites for DR purposes.

Since this migration, both Claranet sites have been added to BLM’s network so that the IT team can migrate applications seamlessly from their on-premises platform to their dedicated platform without intervention from Claranet. The virtualisation of servers both at BLM and at Claranet has enabled a smooth integration between the two environments and the scaling required.

The result

By moving its core IT infrastructure to Claranet on VMware, BLM has been able to support business growth while enabling the rapid launch of new business services.

“Previously we would need to spend time monitoring and maintaining our IT environment, but now, we can respond much more quickly to business demands from our lawyers, meaning we’re providing a better service to BLM’s clients. And when we do need more infrastructure, we can simply request additional memory and storage from Claranet, or spin up new VMware hosts in accordance with business demand, rather than manually installing more servers in our limited on-premise locations.

BLM has also been able to create a formal Disaster Recovery strategy, protecting the workloads and applications in an automated way to ensure a seamless recovery using VMware’s SRM component. “With Claranet’s help we have developed a hybrid solution between our on-premises site and Claranet’s data centres. Adding some legacy hardware and public cloud platforms to our network means our core business applications are now virtually risk-free of outages and centrally managed. This cutting edge capability is delivered from new applications that we can implement quickly and confidently on the platform.”

About BLM

BLM is a leading risk and insurance law firm with head offices in Manchester and London, UK. The firm has a workforce of over 1,600 people, spread over nine offices in the UK and Ireland.

A fast growing law firm, BLM has experienced continual growth over the past 15 years, tripling its workforce as well as nearly doubling the number of offices across the UK. This rapid growth and physical expansion led to an increasingly complex IT infrastructure – and in turn a higher OPEX – needed to run the firm’s key business applications, products and services, as well as the day-to-day office operations of BLM’s lawyers.

Download full case study