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Building Energy Efficiency and Sustainability
News Release from: Comtec Enterprises | Subject: RapidSwitch
Edited by the Buildingtalk Editorial
Team on 02 May 2008
Comtec Case Study: RapidSwitch
Comtec Enterprises relocates 24/7 service provider.
RapidSwitch is a UK ISP specialising in network services They have an extensive London MAN (metro-area network) connecting their five POPs together
This article was originally published on Buildingtalk on 2 May 2008 at 8.00am (UK)
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They are market leaders in offering IP transit and other connectivity services in the UK.
Their services include:.
* IP Connectivity (transit).
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* Ethernet Metro Links (P2P, P2MP).
* Managed Server Housing.
RapidSwitch has a particular strength in providing high capacity, low latency, secure bandwidth.
Their clients range from streaming service providers, through voice over IP (VOIP) businesses, to high volume financial transaction processors.
They understand and accomodate the different needs of their clients.
The Challenges.
Rapid Switch decided to relocate their whole datacentre based in Docklands to Maidenhead where they have purchased a new building to house their expanding datacentre.
Ed Butler, Managing Director at RapidSwitch comments, "Our customers were crying out for two things, power and bandwidth, but unfortunately there are very few sites remaining in London able to support the core networking challenges of today's 24/7 business.
"In order to fulfil the continuity needs of our customers, and create a foundation for our own service development we had to move, however, the nature of our business requires absolute always-on connectivity.
We needed a company that could relocate our entire business with minimal disruption and within a short timescale." One of the most critical things to this relocation was the downtime of each server of which some were given 3 hours rack to rack the rest were given a 6 hour downtime per server.
This was critical to Rapid Switch so their clients had limited loss of connectivity.
The Solution.
Comtec were recommended to rapid switch and were chosen because of their experience in this type of relocation and because of the flexibility they can offer.
Comtec appointed a dedicated project manager to work with RapidSwitch's staff and Comtec's Technical Team.
The project manager devised plans and coordinated each move to ensure the smooth running of the relocation.
Because of the very sensitive nature of this relocation each move had to be fine tuned to ensure minimum downtime and to make sure no outages occurred.
This was achieved by staggering the relocations over 6 nights, each relocation was done between the hours of 11pm and 6am as the use of the servers during this time was minimal and it impacted the least on RapidSwitch and its customers.
Shortly after the initial relocation of 1,500 servers Comtec were commissioned to migrate a further 250 servers from Black Cat Networks to RapidSwitch as they had purchased the company.
For this relocation all servers were de-racked, de-cabled, re-racked and re-cabled.
For both of these relocations Comtec devised dedicated rack plans showing which U space the servers were going from and too and also showing the full make-up of each rack.
Comtec also devised a rack plan showing were the racks were situated within RapidSwitch's datacentre.
This made the relocation smoother for both companies sake.
The results.
Over a period of 6 months Comtec was commissioned to complete the fully managed relocations of over 1,800 servers, 1,500 of which were relocated over 5 consecutive nights during the hours of 11pm and 6am to the result of which zero failures occurred and the downtime criteria speculated to us by the customer was met.
Geoff Denham, Relocations Manager at Comtec Enterprises concludes, "RapidSwitch prides itself on the ability to provide its customers with high availability and service. Request a free brochure from Comtec Enterprises ...
With such a vast number of companies reliant on a smooth relocation, it is essential to abide by specified service level guarantees, something that Comtec Enterprises is committed to exceeding.".
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