Suretek engaged IMC to provide scalable and redundant systems to its internal infrastructure and client base, with outstanding results.
Suretek is an innovative leader and service provider to the monitoring centre sector in the security industry. Suretek is the forerunner for the deployment of leading edge technologies such as SG2, Surepoll Wireless, CAMS, Surecall, One3 and Intellipath.
As a leader in wholesale distribution for the commercial security industry, the Suretek networks host thousands of security monitoring devices and also provide its clients with disaster recovery services. The scale of Suretek’s operations demands a sophisticated deployment of highly resilient servers.
THE CHALLENGE
Previously Suretek relied on clustering technology to provide its core systems with the necessary levels of redundancy and high availability. This technology eventually proved to be difficult to scale quickly in order to meet Suretek’s growth and product development demands.
Partnering with IMC, Suretek began to look for alternative technologies that would provide it with flexibility and high availability required for its business today and scalability for rapid expansion.
“As a market leader in our specialist area of security, we are bound by our commitment to provide our client base with the very best in security solutions. This was the driving force behind Suretek’s decision for exploring VMware technology and the proven benefits it will deliver to our customers,” said Adam Smith, IT and Integrations Manager, Suretek.
One of the main challenges presented by the virtualisation project was ensuring that all Suretek clients received an uninterrupted service while the IMC and Suretek team transitioned databases and application services across to the new system.
Migrating a system that operates 24/7 over to a virtualised environment with minimal impact on the business is always a challenge, but IMC Communications designed a successful migration plan to ensure minimal impact on Suretek’s day-to- day operations.
Furthermore IMC had a very small window of opportunity to migrate the systems, so planning was paramount to ensure all systems were migrated successfully within a week.
THE SOLUTION
As a leader in security technology, Suretek opted for a virtualisation solution that ensured a high-availability platform was delivered.
“We are utilising the very systems we recommend and implement for our clients but on a much larger scale. Together with IMC we have been able to turn what were once complex and often cost-prohibitive systems into simplistic effective solutions. Which, in every way we look at it, equate to cost savings on infrastructure, unequalled redundancy, and greatly improved productivity,” said Smith.
“At Suretek we continue to provide our clients with the latest innovations for the security industry. IMC is part of the team that ensures our clients benefit from the very best in IT infrastructure to deliver the security services we have become renowned for.”
BENEFITS
Partnering with IMC on this project has provided value to Suretek in numerous ways, as the systems allow:
1. Scalability – It is easy to add disk space and servers.
2. Significantly higher resource utilisation by pooling common infrastructure resources and breaking the legacy “one application to one server” model.
3. Physical infrastructure cost reduction - with virtualisation, you can reduce the number of servers and related IT hardware in the data centre. This leads to reductions in real estate, power and cooling requirements, resulting in significantly lower IT costs.
4. Improved operational flexibility and responsiveness - virtualisation offers a new way of managing IT infrastructure and can help IT administrators spend less time on repetitive tasks such as provisioning, configuration, monitoring and maintenance.
5. Increased application availability and improved business continuity: eliminate planned downtime and recover quickly from unplanned outages with the ability to securely backup and migrate entire virtual environments with no interruption in service.
