agility
made possible
™
of client’s geospatial systems
with a CA AppLogic
private cloud environment
BUSINESS
Atkins helps clients across the world make engineering projects a success – from constructing bridges to designing airport security systems. The company is the offi cial engineering design services provider for the London 2012 Games
CHALLENGE
To remain competitive, Atkins must deliver high-quality solutions. To meet a client’s requirements for a complex geospatial system, Atkins needed scalable and available infrastructure without incurring signifi cant capital investment.
SOLUTION
Atkins partnered with Vnetrix to host the client system on a CA AppLogic private cloud platform. The CA Technologies solution enables rapid self-service provisioning, automated fault management and seamless upgrades.
BENEFIT
Atkins can provide its client with enhanced availability, performance and scalability for its geospatial system while minimising costs. The private cloud approach has been extended to support the company’s internal systems. CLIENT PROFILE Industry: Engineering Company: Atkins Employees: 17,700 Revenue: £1.71 billion
Business
Worldwide engineering expertise
Atkins is a global design and engineering consultancy with more than 200 offi ces across the UK, the Middle East, India, China and North America.
The company provides multi-disciplinary expertise across sectors as diverse as transportation, environment, energy, aerospace, communications, security and urban development. Within these fi elds, Atkins’ services range from concept design and feasibility studies to consultancy, engineering and safety.
In the UK, Atkins has provided much of the engineering design expertise behind London 2012. The company has been involved in numerous projects including ensuring airfl ow at ExCeL met Olympic and Paralympic table tennis requirements, creating the raised platform concept which enabled equestrian events to be held without damaging the fragile and historic Greenwich Park site and creating a temporary archery venue at Lord’s Cricket Ground.
The company is traded on the London Stock Exchange and its strategy is focused on consistently generating profi table growth and shareholder value.
Challenge
Supporting a feature-rich geospatial system for a key client
Atkins must meet client requirements for quality while remaining cost-effective, regardless of whether the project involves constructing a new bridge or decommissioning a nuclear power plant.
“To create and maintain a physical
infrastructure that met the client’s
needs would be extremely costly.”
Martin Ford-Whyte
Associate Director, Atkins
One of the company’s public sector clients needed continuous access to a critical geospatial system in order to comply with new legislation.
As Martin Ford-Whyte, Associate Director at Atkins explains, “The application incorporates feature-rich maps and requires signifi cant computing power to render to user browsers quickly, provide detailed layers of data and enable rapid updates. The system also needs to be secure to prevent unauthorised access and denial of service attacks.”
Atkins’ client had very specifi c requirements around reliability, performance, security and scalability which could not be met by a more traditional IT hosting infrastructure. Therefore an alternative, cost-effective alternative was required.
“To create and maintain a physical IT infrastructure that met all the client’s needs would have been extremely complex and costly,” comments Ford-Whyte. “We needed a solution that would enable us to safeguard service continuity and scale-up resources quickly as mapping data expands.”
Solution
Automated provisioning and service assurance
Atkins began exploring the advantages of private cloud infrastructures with IT managed services partner Vnetrix in late 2010, and deployed a platform for the geospatial application based on CA AppLogic in May 2011.
“Traditional processes for ordering,
installing and configuring hardware
have been eliminated.”
Martin Ford-Whyte
Associate Director, Atkins
Ford-Whyte comments, “We decided to work with Vnetrix and the CA AppLogic platform as it would enable us to create a cloud-based platform that met our client’s needs around security, availability and fl exibility.”
The platform underpins the production and test environments for the client’s geospatial system, and Atkins is considering extending its usage to development activities as well.
Via the CA AppLogic portal, Atkins has complete control of the virtualised infrastructure, which is hosted at a Vnetrix datacentre. Atkins can rapidly provide individual servers or entire systems incorporating fi rewalls, load balancers and Web servers using pre-defi ned templates.
“Traditional processes for ordering, installing and confi guring hardware have been eliminated, reducing the time necessary for provisioning from weeks to hours,” comments Ford-Whyte.
The solution’s templates also enable Atkins to rapidly replicate the infrastructure if needed, for example to re-establish the service following a security breach or natural disaster.
To enable rapid changes and upgrades, Atkins can take a copy of the live system, deploy and test the change in a non-production environment and switch over to the upgraded environment once it has been validated. Thereby avoiding expensive and embarrassing service outages.
To further safeguard continuity of service, each server is mirrored on a separate node. “In the event of a hardware failure, CA AppLogic automatically detects the issue and migrates the virtual machine to a different device with no noticeable downtime for application users,” comments Ford-Whyte.
Benefi t
Lower costs, greater fl exibility
By working with Vnetrix and the CA AppLogic platform to create a private cloud infrastructure, Atkins has been able to deliver a fl exible and affordable IT solution that meets its client’s needs.
Ford-Whyte comments, “Using the CA Technologies solution we can provide a level of service that exceeds client expectations and maximises satisfaction.”
“We can provide a level of service
that exceeds client expectations and
maximises satisfaction.”
Martin Ford-Whyte
For example, Atkins can provide its client with:
Enhanced availability and performance of the geospatial system •
Greater fl exibility and scalability as mapping data requirements grow •
A more cost-effective solution due to better use of hardware and lower support, maintenance and •
power overheads.
Due to the success experienced with the private cloud infrastructure for this particular client, Atkins has also migrated some critical aspects of its own infrastructure to the platform.
“Using the CA AppLogic platform and Vnetrix hosting services has proved to be a winning combination for us,” comments Ford-Whyte. “We are now looking at developing a solution based on this that can be re-used across our client base.”
Vnetrix is a UK based Managed Services Provider founded in 2002. It supports small, medium and large businesses providing a wide range of IT support services tailored to individual client needs whether the requirement is basic user support; desktop and server management to managed hosting services.
Operating from six data centres worldwide (UK, US and Europe) Vnetrix is able to build fl exible customised infrastructures based on client needs. Hosting options include shared, dedicated servers and cloud hosting solutions.
Vnetrix clients include Universal Music, Atkins Global and Glastonbury Festivals. For more information visit www.vnetrix.com <http://www.vnetrix.com>
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