Central provided Laltex with a scalable, reliable storage solution to support its continued growth and streamline its IT operations. The new system is operating approximately twenty times faster due to reduced latency and virtual machines can be cloned in just minutes, delivering significant time and resource savings.
The Laltex Group has been in business for over 50 years. It was established in Hong Kong in 1948 and later in the UK in 1962. The company supplies products from across seven divisions to the wholesale, retail and promotional markets on a national and European level.
Working alongside its China and United States offices, the business sources from a global network of suppliers to bring its customers innovative products from around the world, ensuring that its customers continually receive imaginative products with outstanding value.
THE CHALLENGE.
Laltex wanted to replace its ageing storage system and outdated thin clients with a new infrastructure that could support its ongoing growth. It was also important that the new system was manageable for its two IT employees.
The company had been dependent on an ageing fleet of Oracle Sun Ray thin clients, supported by a storage platform that originally had just 800GB backbone.
With the technology reaching end-of-life, it was further strained as the company had more than doubled in size since its implementation. Laltex wanted to refresh its end-user devices while boosting its storage capacity and performance.
Laltex, an existing, longstanding customer of Central, approached the Central team for advice on how to upgrade its storage platform. It was part of a wider office refurbishment that also allowed the company to install a new network infrastructure with fibre channels for optimal connectivity.
THE SOLUTION.
Central assisted with the migration of Regenda’s staff and Head Office facilities from Bolton to Liverpool, setting up new networks to achieve this aim, providing help desk support as an additional resource for Regenda’s IT applications team, as well as assisting the social landlord with disaster recovery, and data centre and infrastructure support – including data storage.
Over the last six years, Central’s multi-level support for Regenda has included:
- Assisting with the migration from Bolton to Liverpool, setting up new networks
- Supporting seamless onsite moves and local subsets for each of Regenda’s offices, providing cabling as IT equipment as required to get new sites up and running quickly and smoothly.
- Managed Regenda’s help desk 24/7, providing consistency, as Regenda’s in-house IT team has developed.
- Providing core infrastructure support for Regenda’s applications team.
- Delivering a service desk for Regenda to raise tickets.
- Providing third or fourth level support for Regenda’s bespoke systems, such as enabling remote access for colleagues to the Citrix desktop.
- Disaster Recovery assistance and sourcing hardware for Regenda’s data centre – Regenda’s Storage Area Network (SAN) is connected through Central. Three years ago the SAN failed – Regenda’s in-house IT team logged it with Central who worked over the weekend to fix it, so by Monday morning it was fixed. Regenda colleagues were unaware of any issues, even though the timeframes were outside of Central’s contract.
"Going live could have taken us upwards of six months but, thanks to the Fujitsu storage replication implemented by Central, we brought that down to just ten weeks and made the entire transition much easier to handle."
– Paul Bentley, IT Manager, Laltex
