Beacon Foods
Beacon Foods required robust IT systems to support their expanding business with customised SLA's to suit their around the clock requirements.
Requirements: IT Support, IT Cabling, Site Wireless System, Disaster Recovery
Location: Beacon Foods, Unit 2 Brecon Enterprise Park, Warren Road, Brecon, Powys, LD3 8BT
Website: http://www.beaconfoods.co.uk
“We have found the entire 5c Services team to be technically knowledgeable, professional, flexible and with the ability to clearly understand our business requirements. 5c Services have supported us since 2008 giving us peace of mind with all our IT requirements including hardware & software installations, server management, licensing and disaster recovery plans. They have consistently delivered high quality solutions for our business and we have no hesitation in recommending them.”
Brief:
- Improve outdated server equipment with a more robust solution
- Strategically align future plans of the company with their IT needs
- Improve the current Wireless solution with a site-wide flexible system
Our Solution:
After discussions with Beacon Foods about current and future plans we identified limitations with their IT systems and their planned growth - increasing company risk if the existing systems fail.
From this and future meetings 5C Services developed proposals to improve these areas showing how much the new system could be expanded on now and for the future while also discussing any possible limitations.
A HP and VMware solution was implemented providing shared SAN storage with the resilience of multiple HP Server hosts through a 10GB backbone. Networking throughout the company was also re-mapped to provide future proofing.
Replacement 2012 R2 Microsoft Servers were deployed increasing the speed of each role while existing more modern servers were migrated onto the new platform with their vendors.
Replication servers and Encrypted EU located cloud backups for Beacon Foods formed part of a now robust Disaster recovery (DR) plan; with scheduled testing of the DR plan Beacon foods have a true expectation of restoration times which can be adapted as required.
A Unified Wi-Fi system was implemented to improve the existing ageing system to increase speed and coverage. Wi-Fi Heat mapping was used to work out areas of coverage required, eliminating current ‘dead spots’. Centralising the whole Wi-Fi system means that management can be done easily and quickly – as well as increasing capacity. We have also setup security policies for different networks (Such as Guest, Staff etc) providing different levels off access and filtering.
With over 4km of CAT6a cable re-run throughout the whole site to replace existing un-labelled network points has made administration became simple and quicker for Beacon Foods – reducing labour required to locate network locations.
All major work was spread across evenings and weekends minimising the impact to Beacon Foods. We also provide continued support for all the systems installed.