OUR DISASTER RECOVERY CAPABILITIES HAD KEPT ME AWAKE AT NIGHT, BUT I COULD FINALLY SLEEP EASILY.
C A S E S T U D Y
APROLIS UK TRADES AGEING SERVERS FOR A SMARTER, CENTRALISED SETUP WITH NODE4
Marcus Curtis, IT Manager, Aprolis UK
Aprolis UK specialises in the sale, rental and ongoing support of materials handling equipment and industrial solutions. This includes forklift trucks, industrial doors and warehouse equipment. Part of the global Monnoyeur Group, Aprolis UK has expanded through acquisitions and now serves over 500 customers, including B & M Retail.
Marcus Curtis, IT Manager, Aprolis UK, explains how moving 90 ageing, scattered servers into Node4 ' s Virtual Data Centre cut the company ' s physical estate to 24, while giving his team the fixed pricing and direct control it needed to win board approval.
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OUR DISASTER RECOVERY CAPABILITIES HAD KEPT ME AWAKE AT NIGHT, BUT I COULD FINALLY SLEEP EASILY.
However, such growth presented significant IT challenges.“ We had around 90 ageing servers at locations across the country,” said Marcus Curtis, IT Manager, Aprolis UK.“ We couldn’ t manage them centrally and had to schedule in-person site visits to resolve issues. On paper, a public cloud solution seemed like the obvious choice, but it was overly complicated and lacked transparent pricing.”
The solution
While assessing his options, Curtis discovered Node4’ s Virtual Data Centre( VDC) offering.“ It was refreshingly simple,” he said.“ There’ s a fixed monthly price with no hidden charges for networking, data transfer, or microtransactions. It finally allowed me to present a solid business case to the board and demonstrate a costed pathway towards cloud and virtualisation.”
As a first step, Node4 established a centralised network backbone by deploying secure MPLS connections from one of its data centres to each of Aprolis UK’ s depots. From there, server migration was straightforward: new servers were provisioned in the VDC and ageing on-premises machines were gradually decommissioned.“ It’ s so easy to spin up new servers and transfer the data,” he said.“ It means we can respond quickly and bring new machines online at a moment’ s notice.”
Crucially, Curtis and his team maintain direct control of their virtual environment.“ We still prefer to deploy our own servers and retain responsibility for them – we’ re a very tech-savvy team, so that suits us well,” he commented.“ But there’ s always the option to transfer more control to Node4 if, for example, we are short-staffed for any reason. The VDC offers both options and that flexibility is invaluable.”
The results Improved Disaster Recovery
From the outset, Curtis was impressed with the redundancy and resilience built into Node4’ s VDC. But, he admits, visiting the Northampton data centre was still a real eye-opener.“ We saw the physical redundancy for ourselves – extra generators that would keep our servers running even if the power failed,
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