Esprit has a centralised IT operation to support its stores and head office. When nearly half of its servers were due for replacement last year, IT operations manager Chris Anderson took the opportunity to investigate virtualisation.

"We did briefly consider a straight one-for-one server swap, but I strongly wanted to move towards virtualisation for several reasons," he said.

"On a technical front, virtualisation offers better redundancy, uptime and high availability. If, for example, you are running three servers and one fails, you simply move the virtual services over to another machine so the system doesn't actually fall over.

"It's the same process with maintenance or if you need to upgrade. You drag the server over to the virtual host, bring down the physical server, complete the upgrade and then bring everything back up."

Following a tender process, Esprit selected Tecala to work on the virtualisation project.

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The company chose to stay with IBM as its hardware provider, replacing the previous 14 servers with three host servers, a management server and a SAN using tiered storage to balance cost and performance.

"One of our biggest questions was whether we could successfully virtualise [our Lotus Notes] email," said Mr Anderson. "Tecala did some investigation and it was deemed feasible so the application was moved over to the new environment along with everything else."

Benefits of the project, which only took a month, include reduced licence fees and maintenance costs, improved uptime, and easier infrastructure management.

Mr Anderson spoke highly of Tecala: "Due to the good work that they've done on this project, we are now employing them to work on other things.  It's the basis for an ongoing relationship."