Charles Ransford & Son
Charles Ransford & Son Ltd is a leading British sawmill supplying high quality fencing and other timber products into the UK market. They bring together years of skilled experience, advanced sawmill technology and some of the most naturally durable home grown timber, sourced from sustainably managed UK Forests, to produce high quality products and the best all-round service in the UK.
Requirements: Server and IT Infrastructure upgrade, Security and Disaster Recovery implementation
Location: Charles Ransford & Son Ltd, Station Street, Bishops Castle, Shropshire SY9 5AQ
Website: www.ransfords.co.uk
“From the outset 5C Services Ltd took time to understand our current requirements and our plans for the future. In setting up our new system they proved themselves to be both technically competent and extremely efficient in the way they went about their work. Since first installation their ongoing commitment to us has been excellent.”
The Brief
- Replacement of ageing server and infrastructure
- Future planing and Disaster Recovery solution
- On-going IT support
Solution
Following initial meetings and planning with Charles Ransford & Son, 5C Services undertook a project to replace dated Servers and Network infrastructure which would help them increase productivity and protect them for the foreseeable future.
A solution provided by 5C Services consisted of a lot of preparation work, data cleaning and in house preparation that included planning, updates and set up to ensure that actual install and implementation process goes smoothly. Following a successful first stage we proceeded to actual install and implementation stage. This was done in few stages and was started off by Comms cabinet install and tidy up of the existing one followed by installation of hardware and networking. We then proceeded with migrating data/clients and set up of backup server. To ensure the smooth handover we made sure we have engineers on site for any post install snagging so if there was any little things they could be sorted very quickly. The result of the above was that client now have 6 virtual servers using VMware residing on 2 hosts with storage located on a SAN. To maximise cost saving we utilised their old server and converted it to an offsite replication server for the purpose of Disaster Recovery.
An enterprise level Firewall was installed, integrating the 2 existing networks but still ensuring that security was not compromised.
Installation time was provisioned for out of hours to ensure there was little to no down time.
We now provide ongoing IT support for Charles Ransford and Son and maintain all of their IT Infrastructure.