NCC Education

Our customer

A global provider and awarding body of British education

Headquartered in Manchester, NCC Education is a provider of globally recognised business and computing qualifications. It offers training and course materials from its network of accredited training centres, including colleges and universities in China, Malaysia, Singapore and India, for both online and classroom-based learning.

The challenge

An alternative approach to infrastructure NCC Education is governed by Ofqual (Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation) and its best practice guidelines, which include ensuring that it has a sound business continuity and disaster recovery plan in place. However, with an ageing IT infrastructure and kit hosted in a local datacentre, the organisation was concerned about availability of its business-critical systems in the event of an incident that caused any significant downtime.

Key points

• IaaS to provide disaster recovery
• Cost-effective solution to replace ageing physical IT infrastructure and meet regulatory requirements
• Migration from old physical platform of Dell servers and switches onto the new virtual environment
• IP address range was placed on its preferred subnet
• Set-up of Microsoft Hyper-V virtual server as standby in the event of a system failure
• IaaS deployed as a shared managed service
• In the event of a system failure all virtual servers can be replicated and brought back up in minutes

Our solution

M247 Disaster Recovery and Infrastructure as a Service (DRaaS / IaaS)

Having trialled Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) previously, Bettoni recognised that it could be a cost-effective alternative to replacing their own existing infrastructure. IaaS provides virtualised cloud-based computing resources that are owned and managed by a third-party provider. At the time, NCC was already working with M247 to provide its hosting services at its Manchester data centres and Bettoni spotted the opportunity to transfer this investment and for M247 to host and manage its infrastructure instead. A visit from parent company, Singapore-based Infomatics, who had previously migrated its servers and data to the cloud, confirmed Bettoni and his team’s decision to invest in IaaS.

Working together to create seamless migration

M247 worked with NCC Education to plan migration from its old physical platform of Dell servers and switches and onto the new virtual environment. A dedicated M247 engineer took charge of the project and remains on hand to deal with any issues. In order to ensure a smooth transition, NCC Education was keen that its IP address range was placed on its preferred subnet, and M247 worked with them to achieve this. The whole migration process was seamless with no interruption for users. A Microsoft Hyper-V virtual server is now on standby should there be a system failure so all virtual servers can be replicated and brought back up in minutes in the event of any system downtime

Deployment

A shared managed service

While NCC Education takes care of its applications and servers, M247 provides and manages the infrastructure and firewall. M247 hosts the infrastructure from its secure data centre in Manchester. Built using best of breed technology, its service offering includes performance, capacity and upgrades and is underpinned by a robust SLA. M247 is also responsible for hardware failure and replacments, including a resilient gigabit Internet uplink. The service is charged at a fixed monthly cost that includes maintenance and repair costs. It is also scalable and can align with any of NCC Education’s changing application needs.

The result

Now, thanks to IaaS, NCC Education has a robust disaster recovery plan in place, compliant with Ofqual’s business continuity requirements, and ensuring business as usual in the event of an incident that causes business downtime.