An aging server infrastructure that threatened the business and had ever increasing service costs

The Situation

Our client is a major manufacturer of some of the safest automobiles in the world and they focus on achieving and maintaining the very highest level of customer satisfaction. With an aging server infrastructure that had increasing maintenance costs and struggling to meet business demands, the main driver for change was the increasing cost and risk to the business.

WCI was called in to look at alternatives that would address the infrastructure problems with either replacement servers or a consolidation approach.

The options were: 
do nothing – continue to drive higher costs and risks
replace ‘like for like’ – a cost prohibitive solution
adopt a consolidation approach – cost effective solution with additional business benefits and reduced risk

The Solution

WCI's approach to the situation was to audit and monitor each client site affected and  identify how a server consolidation approach would reduce rising service costs and improve operation efficiency.  By reducing the number of servers, it was  the best value/least risk scenario. Server support costs are calculated on a “Microsoft style” basis based on number of servers plus number of users per server and consolidation would be based on a phased approach to reduce risk to business and operations. The project affected five sites across the UK and over 400 users were dependent on the applications, storage, network infrastructure and line links. 

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CaseStudyAdvancedInfrastructure.pdf