Forterra is a leading UK manufacturer of bricks, blocks, precast concrete, paving and many other vital construction products and services. The company relies on a wide range of IT infrastructure to support its product development, manufacturing and operations.
Combatting outages from an unresponsive colocation provide
Forterra hosted its infrastructure at a facility in Germany. Over time, Forterra experienced technical roadblocks, slow response times and outdated multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) networks. Due to the routine outages and complications, Forterra partnered with Service Express to transfer its IBM i logical partition (LPAR) from Germany to the UK.
Establishing a new and reliable home for IT infrastructure
After multiple discovery meetings, Service Express identified the company’s need to redirect its IT team’s time and resources to other core areas of the business. Instead of creating a single LPAR, Forterra migrated 91 virtual machines (VMs) into Service Express’ data centre. Service Express’ technical teams handled the migration in phases outside of regular working hours and during weekends. The migration from start to finish spanned several months.
Industry:
Construction Materials
Location:
Northampton, UK
Service: Specialty Cloud for IBM Power Solution
“Service Express has delivered on its promises for cost savings, increased availability, scalable solutions and fantastic service. It’s a genuine pleasure to work with their team and I’d like to thank them for making my team’s jobs a lot easier.”
– Paul Inman, IT Director, Forterra
“Our environment was migrated with zero outages,” said Paul Inman. “Excellent service was provided and still is. So much so, we have considerably more VMs at Service Express than we originally planned due to physical to virtual (P2V) migrations.”
Improved uptime and productivity
By migrating systems to Service Express, Forterra has observed several improvements.
- Increase in availability and system performance speeds
- Simplified system administration
- Strengthened productivity with new MPLS network connection
“We have realised a triple-digit cost saving,” says Paul Inman. “The faster VMs and MPLS network connections have all provided for increased productivity.”
Looking ahead to the future
Service Express currently monitors and maintains Forterra’s suite of data centre and MPLS services and over 125 of the company’s VMs. Forterra’s team is pleased with the process from start to finish, and they look forward to additional projects in the future.
