Managed Server Hosting

Case Study

Background

Established in 2001 and based in Nottingham, ActivePlan provides a specialised application service which empowers the management of facilities, from design to maintenance. The company's technology has a number of uses, from briefing and specification management, space planning, right through to cost modelling and facilities management. It is used across a number of industry sectors including construction, education, healthcare and retail. With a customer base comprised of prominent national and international companies and organisations such as British Land, Equion, Excellcare, NHS, DFES, WH Smith and PC World in the UK, Quaker, Conagra and Macy's in the US and ASB Bank of New Zealand. ActivePlan helps its client better design, plan and manage their space and this can result in six figure savings on projects, so it is vital the project team has constant access.

The Challenge

The nature of facilities and planning management requires the involvement of a number of contributors including procurers, planners, surveyors and architects. Through its web based application, ActivePlan ensures that all parties have access to a wide variety of both client critical and non critical data 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Negative experiences with previous providers forced ActivePlan to look for a reliable hosting and recovery solution that would help minimise hard drive failures and thus limit downtime, ActivePlan also needed the right guarantees to ensure quick and accurate data restoration.

"The sheer volume of data that must be made available to our clients is significant and we have to ensure that it is available as and when the customer needs it. The key to a good hosting partner is reliability. When and if there are failures we need to have the assurances that everything will be done to resolve the situation."

Tim Aikin - Director of Web Applications, ActivePlan

The Solution

Having run online systems and hosting environments since 1995, ActivePlan's team had a good knowledge of the hosting and recovery market and understand the importance of a resilient and reliable service partner.

"We were initially interested in Griffin's SANServe solution because it removed the need for server specific hard disk storage, something no other provider could offer. The technology coupled with the assurances and the support available were positive factors in choosing Griffin."

Tim Aikin

Griffin Internet met with ActivePlan in January 2006 and in March they signed up to Griffin's SANServe. The company currently has two servers with 25GB storage space on Griffin's SAN. All of ActivePlan's client critical data including applications are on the SAN with non client critical information residing on the server's hard disks. The SAN itself is housed in Griffin's Leicester Data Centre, one of three in the country. If needed ActivePlan has the option to co-replicate data in other centres.

Essentially Griffin Internet provides ActivePlan with a 100% business continuity guarantee ensuring that every possible effort is maintained to keep data available to ActivePlan's many clients.

The Benefits

ActivePlan found that for the first time a hosting and recovery provider had the technology and guarantees to offer them true peace of mind. The company is now confident that all client data, critical or otherwise, is fully protected and managed.

In the event of a server crash ActivePlan has 24/7 remote access to these servers, however should a reboot of the main server fail then shared hot-standby servers are available in each data centre. ActivePlan also has the option of using SANServe's unique 'snap shot' functionality which creates an exact duplicate of the data volume at any specific time, meaning there are no data restore issues. Another important factor for ActivePlan was Griffin's 24 hour dedicated technical account team on hand in case of emergencies, something not offered through previous providers.

Furthermore, as and when additional storage is needed, Griffin's SANServe is fully scaleable and extra storage can be added without causing downtime. Also, by using Griffin's wholly owned IP network, ActivePlan and their customers benefit from faster connectivity rates and latest technologies.

"It is vital that we have partners that we can trust because ultimately the success of our company depends on it. When hardware failures have happened in the past, the time and energy used to resolve them is huge. Griffin Internet has the technology and the systems in place to give us the peace of mind that we've been looking for."

Tim Aikin