Site MapWarren and Mahoney
Virtualisation aligns business growth with sustainability strategy
Renowned architectural firm Warren and Mahoney was established in 1955. The company has offices in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Queenstown.
With a history of innovation and design distinction, Warren and Mahoney is widely regarded as the pinnacle of New Zealand's architectural modernism. The company has completed a number of notable projects that include Westpac Stadium, Parliament House, Christchurch Town Hall and Convention Centre, Christchurch and Wellington's International Airports, and the Supreme Court of New Zealand.
After practising sustainable business processes for a number of years, in 2007 Warren and Mahoney became New Zealand's first architectural practice to achieve carboNZero certification. Founding members of the New Zealand Green Building Council and GreenBuild – a national building products database, the company has also developed their own set of environmental protocols which guide all aspects of their architectural engagements.
A proud history of excellence has seen the firm win an impressive number of prestigious awards both locally and internationally, and in 1985, company founder Sir Miles Warren was knighted for his services to architecture.
Virtualising the IT infrastructure
A focus on sustainable business practices, an innovative culture and close integration between offices are at the core of Warren and Mahoney, and their ICT strategy has been developed to fit accordingly.
The company's existing IT environment was generating a substantial infrastructure footprint, resulting in high operating costs. The infrastructure consisted of ten physical servers with direct attached storage and a failure of any one of these had the opportunity to create substantial disruption to business operations.
System administration was performed manually and reactively, there was no centralised management of their IT resource and no flexibility within the environment to accommodate growth without increasing their existing hardware footprint.
“IT is absolutely core to the company's operations. our technical design software and drawing packages put huge loads on our servers, which needs to be managed carefully,” says Peter Helps, ICT Manager.
Warren and Mahoney required an infrastructure that provided high levels of reliability, simplified management and alignment with their CarboNZero certification. The solution needed to meet business and client delivery requirements, decrease the company's risk to business continuity and position them well for future growth.
The company engaged Datasouth for the delivery of a solution that would allow for server consolidation thereby reducing environmental impact, improved utilisation of resources, scalability, growth and enhanced manageability.
Datasouth recommended the implementation of an HP Blade server environment to help virtualise much of Warren and Mahoney's existing physical infrastructure. The benefits of the solution included the utilisation of modern technology and reduced power and cooling requirements, while providing all the features of a modern virtual infrastructure.
Supporting sustainable principles
Consistent with the company's long held commitment to sustainability, the project had to deliver not just on IT effectiveness but a reduction in the company's carbon footprint.
The solution implemented by Datasouth replaced a Windows Server 2003 environment which was resource hungry in terms of both energy and the hands-on management required to keep the platform operating at an optimal level. It also supported their sustainability strategy by significantly decreasing the company's infrastructure and carbon footprints – reducing the number of servers and decreasing power consumption.
“We have seen some major power savings, which has reduced our carbon footprint”, says Peter.
Achieving mission critical reliability
“Reliability is an absolute bottom line for our busy teams of architects working on large projects”, says Peter. “our architects need reliability in an IT solution. We chose the Datasouth approach because it provided more scalability and flexibility than others we evaluated.”
The solution utilised Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Hyper-V R2 technology, providing the foundation for multiple virtualised operating systems on each server. This technology is considered best practice and also provides important disaster recovery features.
Warren and Mahoney now has the ability to share workloads between servers, providing both performance and resource benefits. In the event of system maintenance, virtual machines can now be manually moved while users are online without interruption. In the case of a server failure the servers are deployed in a high availability cluster so should a server fail, then the other servers in the cluster detect this and act accordingly. This has provided a high level of resilience previously only available in complicated and expensive solutions requiring third party software and hardware.
each server stores the majority of its data within the redundant Storage Area Network (SAN). The setup is modular in design, so if physical or virtual servers are required in future they can be added with ease.
Enhanced management of IT resource
“It has definitely made my life easier in areas like deploying new servers as demand arises. overall it is more streamlined; it is fantastic,” says Peter.
The solution has resulted in centralised management of their IT resource and increased collaboration amongst staff – particularly useful when the company utilises expertise across all of their offices for the delivery of a project.
“Datasouth's virtualised server solution allowed us to split roles out into separate servers, when historically if you were locked into the hardware you would have to load that server up with multiple roles.”
Warren and Mahoney now has a flexible and reliable IT infrastructure that can easily be adapted to suit the company as it grows.
“Datasouth gave us good advice and options for how to proceed. That insight gave us a clear picture of where we wanted to go. They worked with us to understand our business requirements, then tailored a streamlined solution to meet our needs”.
