Maltapost plc has just completed a very important project which involved the adoption of a virtualised server infrastructure for its IT needs. Moving to a virtualised server environment based on Microsoft’s Hyper-V R2 has given Maltapost’s small IT team the means to support a large and continually growing technology footprint.
“Selection of a solution began in 2010 however, other existing solutions were highly expensive and certainly not scalable from a cost perspective,” explained Pierre Montebello, chief officer mails and systems at Maltapost. “We then looked at the Microsoft virtualisation solution and were very impressed. We chose the Microsoft virtualisation solution over VMware for several reasons, including cost, compatibility with our existing skill set, and Microsoft’s long-term product road map.”
Today, Maltapost runs its virtualised environment on four HP ProLiant BL460c G7 server computer blades, which host some 30 virtual machines. The servers are configured with two quad-core processors and are supported by an HP P2000 fibre channel storage area network with 10 terabytes of raw capacity. The company manages its virtual environment using System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2.
Mr Montebello explained how throughout the past years, Maltapost had been constantly looking for new ways how to use technology to improve the quality of its postal services. “In time, this resulted in the deployment of more and more servers and by 2009 Maltapost had more than 40 servers in a small server room. This situation was becoming unmanageable, with every new system further increasing the day to-day challenges we faced with respect to systems administration, power consumption, cooling and physical space.”
“Such an approach also presented reliability challenges but at the same time, we didn’t have the space or the budget to deploy failover servers. We did what we could, such as using redundant disks, but that will not keep key systems running if an entire server crashes or prevent downtime during service intervals.
What’s more, although most servers were dedicated to a single solution, physical constraints sometimes forced us to run multiple applications and services on a server, in violation of IT best practices. Now, after having completed this project, virtualisation has not only eliminated the capacity issues we faced, but also improved reliability and reduced IT effort,” added Mr Montebello.
Kinetix were commissioned to deploy the virtualisation system in collaboration with Microsoft Malta. Curt Gauci, managing director at Kinetix said “Microsoft’s virtualisation solutions assist organisations to realise value, availability, and agility from the desktop and datacentre, to the cloud. It also gives businesses the opportunity to increase the availability of services, thereby increasing end-user satisfaction.”
Using Double-Take Availability, the entire IT infrastructure is fully replicated to a disaster recovery site. This solution provides affordable data protection, ensures minimal data loss and enables immediate recovery from any system outage. It continuously captures changes as they happen and replicates those changes to one or more servers at any location. The end result for Maltapost is that downtime would be minimal in the unlikely event of a disaster.
“Moving to a virtualised server environment based on Microsoft Hyper-V R2 has given Maltapost’s small IT team the means to support a large and continually growing technology footprint. Virtualisation has not only eliminated the capacity issues we faced, but also improved reliability and reduced IT effort,” concluded Mr Montebello.