08701 999 377

METROLINE

Summary

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The IT department at Metroline ensures the

technology infrastructure is in place so that the

company can run their fleet of over 1,200 buses

and carry over 250 million passengers each

year in one of the world’s busiest cities.

dsp were chosen not only for the management

of the upgrade, but to also provide continuous

managed services. This enabled Metroline to

improve their business processes, maintain

critical systems whilst managing budget

expectations.

METROLINE

Requirement

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Metroline needed assistance in overcoming a myriad

of issues such as the limited resources to cover the

maintenance of the E-Business Suite which caused

difficulties when key staff were away as well as there

being no automated monitoring or altering taking

place to manage the system.

Metroline essentially needed access to the skills of

an experienced DBA and not have to employ them on

a full time basis.

Underpinning this was the need for guidance on

Oracle backup and disaster recovery.

METROLINE

Solutions

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The initial objective for dsp was to ensure

that the application and database were

seamlessly upgraded and the necessary

backup and recovery solutions were

implemented. The delivery of this was on

time and to budget which gave Metroline

the confidence that dsp were the right

technology partner for them.

The second phase was to ensure that there

was a level of support provided to maintain

the systems and databases.

METROLINE

Business Results

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One of the core benefits of the Managed Service

offering for Metroline was the priority 24/7 access

to pool of expertise. This catered for all

fluctuations in the resources which included the

impact from holidays, sickness and training leave.

The second key benefit was the cost savings due to

the need for an extra E-Business Suite DBA,

developer and functional consultant was

eliminated.

Above all, Metroline had the peace of mind that

they were managed by an experienced team of

professionals.

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“dsp have become our Oracle

partner of choice. They are

committed to providing quality

consultants, advice and support

and do so in a professional and

caring fashion. With a recent

successful upgrade of the E-

Business Suite, we certainly feel

very comfortable with dsp.”

IISS

Background

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Systems failure is simply not an option for the

International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS),

which is the world’s leading authority on politcal-

military conflict.

Behind the scenes private meetings and public

global conferences attended by world bodies are

facilitated by IISS. They depend on access to real-

time applications;

cross global communications; and an IT

infrastructure that is always on and does not lose

data – ever. As non-profit organisation, conference

hosting and organisation offers IISS a critical

revenue stream.

IISS

Background

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In 2011, IISS set out to build a high

availability architecture for the enterprise,

based on Citrix Xen Desktop 5 and VMware 4

as a virtualization solution, capable of

transforming desktops and applications

into an on-demand service for the several

thousands of users that can access the

system at conference time.

This architecture underpins the whole

business. It has a crucial role in supporting

the real-time availability of the applications

which facilitate the conferences.

IISS

The requirement

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dsp first set out to understand IISS’ goal.

This was to achieve availability which was

tolerant of a site outage- whether caused

by a network communications failure, loss

of a server, a storage area network (SAN)

or complete data centre.

The requirements specified 100 per cent

data recovery in under one minute

delivered as a scalable solution on a

standardised platform.

IISS

The solution

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Working with the hardware and infrastructure that IISS had already purchased, dsp

carried out an assessment and recommended a geo cluster solution featuring

geographically dispersed servers that can failover from one to another or from one

data centre to another within 30 seconds, which is as fast as the technology allows.

The solution was designed and built based on a four node Multi Instance Failover

Cluster using SQL Server 2008 R2. Technically challenging to design and build, geo

clusters are often described as “high availability Nirvana for Windows.”

IISS

Business Benefits

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Benefits at a glance:

• 100 per cent availability

• Failover in 30 seconds

• 60 per cent reduction in hardware

• 60 per cent reduction in database

instances and software costs

• Tenfold increase in performance

• Standardised, and easier to support

• Self-funding from savings

08701 999 377

“Over the years we’ve worked with

many third parties. dsp is one of the

most professional- once timescales

were agreed they were met every

step of the way.”

08701 999 377

www.dsp.co.uk

14 Floral Street

Covent Garden

London

WC2E 9DH

United Kingdom