iomart Carries Out Storage Migration for Barton Willmore

iomart Group Plc has carried out a server and storage migration for Barton Willmore, an integrated planning and design consultant.

Barton Willmore works with developers and public sector organisations. It steered the new £40m ‘Islands’ attraction at Chester Zoo, the biggest development in the history of UK zoos, through the planning process.

When Barton Willmore moved into new offices in the centre of Reading, it decided it was time to move its IT infrastructure off-premise and chose dedicated hosting specialist RapidSwitch, one of iomart’s subsidiaries, to migrate it out of an old set of barns into parent company iomart’s data centre in Maidenhead.

Simon Webb, IT procurement officer, Barton Willmore, explained: “If we had got the migration wrong we would have been in big trouble. However the whole process was incredibly smooth. The RapidSwitch team came and helped us dismantle all the servers and transport them to their data centre and then re-built them with us.“

In all about 25 physical servers were moved into RapidSwitch’s accredited and secure N+1 28000m_ data centre in Maidenhead. This included a massive EMC VNX SAN installation containing both physical and virtual servers.

Barton Willmore is responsible for more than 30TB of project data on behalf of its clients. Most of this is file data created by its large team of designers who use software packages such as Photoshop, InDesign and AutoCAD.

Neil Christie, commercial director, RapidSwitch, a trading name of iomart Hosting Ltd, part of the iomart Group Plc, explained: “The physical security of our customers’ equipment and the protection of their data is at the heart of everything we do. We carry ISO 27001, 2000 and 9001 accreditations and our entire network, transit links and servers are monitored 24 hours a day.“

Lee Cripps, IT manager, Barton Willmore, said: “Our data is our gold and without it there is no Barton Willmore. It really is very important to us to know that it is secure and protected within RapidSwitch’s data centre and the wider iomart Group network.“

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