Cambrian Printers
Cambrian Printers is the home of short run colour printing. This family owned business has been constantly evolving since 1860. Their reputation is built on quality, service and technical excellence. Our commitment to reducing our environmental impact has made us acknowledged market leaders.
Requirements: Server consolidation, Firewall installation, VoIP system, Leased line, HP SAN install, On-going IT support
Location: Cambrian Printers Ltd, Llanbadarn Road, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, SY23 3TN
Website: www.cambrian-printers.co.uk
“As a large commercial printer, we had always employed an IT department, but as technology changed, there was less call for a full-time department to handle our needs. When our staff member chose to leave to further his own career, 5C Services were the natural choice to replace the in-house department. They are conveniently close for major projects, but manage all our day to day needs remotely.
The team are very knowledgeable, helpful and extremely professional in all they do. The response time to some queries is so fast that we barely know we’ve raised a request for support. As a result of such excellent day to day IT technical service, we have recently chosen to migrate our VoIP phone system and broadband connection to consolidate all our technological needs in one place. The whole team really are the perfect solution for a small business’ IT needs and the fact they deliver everything with a smile makes them a pleasure to deal with.”
The Brief
Cambrian Printers server count spanned over 3 data cabinets with a range of dated server running a range of OS systems of Windows & Linux. All were running a range of tasks creating a large requirement for support due to this mixed environment. Server specification was proving inadequate for many of the tasks they were performing whilst other were underutilised.
Basic administration and tasked proved to be time consuming requiring specific or non-standard tasks to be carried out, increasing the amount of support required.
The current firewall didn’t seem to provide any insight or reporting required for management of usage, security issues or view of traffic flowing though the different networks or the outside world, while the Servers and Endpoints had a range of free & paid security products with no management
Our Solution
Creating a cluster system based on HP SAN, HP Servers and VMware we created a robust , resilient and up gradable platform for a range of Windows 2012 r2 Servers to create a replacement set of servers to host the required roles of the Windows domain.
For existing key servers migration to faster, more resilient storage immediately saw an increase in performance, while minimising downtime for key systems.
The current backup method of scripted data copies was replaced with Veeam Backup & Replication to provide a robust copy of full data to offsite as well as a full replication of all the servers onto different hardware providing a fast restore of all there servers.
To improve security Trend Micro Worry Free Std provided a fully managed system for all servers and endpoints, while the configured groups provided different protection to different departments whilst allowing a small footprint on the machines. The current Watchguard firewall was perfectly fit for purpose and policies were simply re-done, configured with the new Windows Active Directory to provide user based policies and well as looking after BYOD devices. Reporting servers provide Management with granular reporting as required while providing thorough logging for IT support.
Consolidating server equipment for Cambrian Printers into a quarter of the space has saved them environmental costs as well as improving UPS battery run time.
As a result of this Cambrian Printers have lowered their support requirement while increasing capacity and resilience.