Virtualisation and Disaster Recovery - The Smith Brothers Stores Story

Smith Brothers Stores established in 1897 are one of the oldest and largest independent merchants in the UK today. Specialising in the supply of tubes, valves and fittings they currently operate from seven branches throughout the UK.

The Challenge:
• Replace aging hardware platforms with a flexible, cost-effective, infrastructure that meets SBS’s demands of today as well as in the future.
• Implement a disaster recovery solution, enabling high availability throughout all sites.
• Deliver a solution which is scalable and able to react quickly with change in business requirements.
• Reduce the power and cooling requirements for running IT.

How did Abtec help?
We delivered a solution enabling high availability throughout all sites and full Disaster Recovery fail over. The components of the solution included; Virtualisation, Server Consolidation and Data Replication in a load balancing environment, between the Head Office and the Disaster Recovery site.

Deployment Environment:
• VMWare Enterprise Edition
• Hitachi ISCSI SANS
• HP DL360 Diskless Servers
• Microsoft Data Center
• Symantec

SBS Testimonial:
“From our perspective, having a VMware environment as an IT standard delivers significant business value to SBS. VMware virtualisation technology delivers excellent flexibility in meeting our needs as well as considerable cost savings, which helps us meet our overall company’s business objectives. Working with Abtec has been excellent. It is a beneficial partnership and they are a great company to deal with, delivering on what they are supposed to do. What more is there to say than that?”
Steve Smith, Managing Director, Smith Brothers Stores Ltd

Abtec Response:
“Our solution has not only enabled Disaster Recovery within the business, it has also given SBS a platform to grow, by adding; additional sites, users and applications. Using VMware allows SBS to provision new virtual machines in minutes and react faster to their business demands. Overall the implementation has met all of SBS’s business challenges within an affordable solution that is right for any SME business” 
Phil Kennerdell, Sales Manager, Abtec Network Systems Ltd