A nice article has just been published by network communications news on a recent VDI and vSphere project I have just completed for Bernicia Group, I have copied the article below.

Bernicia Group, the housing organisation, has completed a major overhaul of its IT infrastructure, adopting a virtualised environment and reducing its disaster recovery (DR) period from days to less than 30 minutes. The development hopes to cut costs, speed up its processes and bolster security.

Bernicia, which has over 8,000 homes in the North East of England, worked with SITS to virtualise over 80 physical servers and switch from Microsoft Hyper-V to VMware software. The organisation’s storage architecture has been reduced from 18 rack units to three and, with a second virtual infrastructure deployed securely off-site. 

SITS has also implemented a resilient Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) using VMWare Horizon View, providing a faster and universal experience for remote and in-office staff.

More than 300 users can now access software via a virtual PC operating centrally on Bernicia’s servers. Existing PCs are being converted into thin clients and are now centrally managed by IGEL’s Universal Management Suite. Horizon View software has been installed on laptops, tablets and off-site PC’s, increasingly used by Bernicia staff as the organisation expands and remote working rises.
Gary Hind, head of ICT at Bernicia, said: ‘Overall, our new technology infrastructure has allowed us to make major savings in several areas, including in licensing, power consumption and DR contracts, as well as significantly improving our productivity.’

SITS specialises in using best-of-breed products to provide a range of services, including server and desktop virtualisation, business continuity, enterprise storage, data centre facilities and health check and planning services. Earlier this year the business won the coveted Customer Choice Award from Data Protection Specialists Veeam Software.

Source : http://www.networkcommunicationsnews.co.uk/index.php/1624-virtualisation-investment-boosts-Bernicia