With demanding high growth companies to work with and the need to develop close long term relationships, McQueen’s rely heavily on efficient data services to deliver a quality service.

McQueen operates from a single central London site with around 30 users on an ageing server infrastructure providing MS Office, Exchange for Email and a number of 3rd party applications.

The business experienced a high number of outages of the infrastructure and were concerned about the financial costs to the business of an IT failure at a critical period of negotiations of a key deal.

The management team highlighted other areas of concern:

• Their lack of a robust disaster recovery plan.
• Loss of office access.
• Loss of data access.

The company had become disillusioned and had lost confidence in their incumbent IT support supplier to provide a scalable strategy to match their business plans.

Systems IT designed an onsite redundant server solution that allowed auto failover of the primary server to the redundant server in the event of a hardware server failure.

This enhanced high availability architecture ensures that McQueen’s risk of loss of access to important data and email is removed.

In addition to the hardware replication onsite, SystemsIT implemented a highly robust offsite disaster recovery plan providing back up of both server images and data every 20 minutes onsite with a consolidated daily change offsite each night.

These offsite server images in conjunction with Systems IT own data centre infrastructure provides McQueen with comfort in the knowledge that a major disaster to the office environment would mean minimal disruption. A full recovery of all applications to a hosted virtual server means they will be working again within 4 hours.

Wendy added: “Systems IT took the time to fully understand the key issues faced by our company, considered our business plans for the future enabling them to offer a credible IT strategy to replace and support the IT architecture moving forward.”

Finally the IT infrastructure design and implementation was overlaid with a tailored managed support services.

The new infrastructure was built, tested and delivered out of hours ensuring the project had no adverse effects on the day to day running of the business.

To date McQueen has had no unscheduled downtime of their servers and the users enjoy fast and smooth access to our team of fully qualified engineers.

Wendy sums up: “From the initial consultation through to the delivery and support of the new infrastructure SystemsIT have delivered on all their commitments.”

• High availability of the in-house infrastructure protects against reduced productivity and financial loss due to hardware failure.
• A robust Disaster Recovery plan to ensure system availability and data recovery in the event of the loss of the office access or IT hardware.