Admiral Group is a leading force in the motor insurance world. Having spent the last 14 years building up a database of more than one million customers, the organisation recognised that data is a number one priority.

Silverstring installed Predatar to reduce the manual monitoring processes that Admiral had in place. The benefits were immediately clear with the new automation.

Anglian Home Improvements is the UK’s leading home improvements company with more than 40 years experience and an extensive range of products.

Five years on from the installation of TSM, the Anglian IT team were facing problems with the software and this is where Silverstring were brought onboard to deliver a solution. Predatar was implemented and Anglian are now working the Predatar software on all data chains and are able to resolve any issues even before they arise.

BLG is a leading international law firm. Due to growth, they needed to automate their all-important backups and radically improve their data retrieval processes.

Silverstring's turnkey solution gave them the increase in functionality they needed and reduced their overall storage costs - without any downtime.

Clinphone provides advanced support for clinical trials. With 1,190 trials conducted and counting, they needed an enterprise strength backup and restore solution that would grow with their ever expanding data resources.

Silverstring partnered with IBM to give them a seamless ‘on demand' solution that ensured all their future needs would be addressed.

Denbighshire County Council covers an area from the North Wales coastal resorts of Rhyl and Prestatyn down through the Vale of Clwyd, south as far as Corwen and the popular tourist town of Llangollen.

Deciding to move backup from a multi-site operation to a single sited TSM environment, Silverstring were onboard to deliver Predatar to remove the pitfalls of manually running the platform and add a higher level of functionality.

The Edrington Group is Scotland’s leading premium spirits company, owning and producing several of the most famous brands of Scotch. The company operates multiple sites across Scotland and is growing overseas.

Silverstring and IBM worked alongside The Edrington Group to implement IBM’s Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) and Predatar to manage the groups new infrastructure.

Islington is London's smallest borough and is an area of tremendous diversity, not only in terms of the people who live there, but also the environment. The council offers a wide range of services to the local community that extends from Advice & Benefits to Environment Planning. The IT setup is extremely complex and serviced by an internal IT department called TSG Technology Solutions Group.  The IT department sell their working concepts to the various areas of the council for their services to be undertaken.

 

The IT department acknowledged their main issue, which was their existing Disaster Recovery (DR) process. All DR’s were executed on an individual basis for each department and proved to be a very time consuming and costly exercise, with a very high level of manual intervention. The IT department wanted to reduce the financial and manual resource allocated to the existing processes so that they could maximise their output.

 

Silverstring were approached to find a solution and delivered Predatar Recovery Tracker (PRT) as a fool proof answer – providing them with the automation and recovery times to offer sufficient Service Level Agreements (SLA's). When PRT was fully integrated, Islington Council were able to reallocate their resources and benefit from the new transparency and continuity they had of their key systems. PRT now allows the council to operate an automated recovery testing process, covering multiple servers, which significantly reduces the manual management and time involved.

 

"With Predatar Recovery Tracker we are now able to, as a department, work more efficiently in terms of cost and manual resource giving us the ability to increase our services to the entire council." Jonathon Beacham, IT Consultant, Islington Council.

The JD Williams story begins in 1875 – Manchester entrepreneur James David Williams founded his own company – JD Williams. Many of the names now associated with JD Williams have a long history, with more than 50 separate trading titles. Most of the major catalogue titles now have dedicated websites, and have several titles that only exist online; just now, around 35% of JD Williams’ business comes through this growing channel.

The JD Williams IT department, acknowledged the issue of being unable to scale due to the increased workload caused by nearly 40TB of new fashion images that are hosted online. The system was also impacting on the smooth running of the mainframe system which was causing business processing to run late, and because of this TSM was never granted the tape resource required to create an offsite disaster recovery copy of the backups.

Silverstring were tasked to consult and redesign JD Williams existing TSM environment with the objective to remove the TSM infrastructure from a mainframe to a windows based environment, increase the data storage capacity from 6 terabytes to 50 (and capable of growth), and guarantee full system recoveries to meet appropriate Service Level Agreements (SLAs) both onsite and in DR.

Silverstring installed Predatar Recovery Tracker to track their data recovery processes and ensure business continuity. JD Williams are now able to restore whole applications in the event of a disaster or individual file restores within a 4 hour window and provide an all-round service guarantee to the business.

"With Predatar in place, we can now rely on a resilient and efficient platform, and are able to manage our new TSM environment whilst reducing the dependence on manual intervention." Gary Naylor, IT Manager, JD Williams.

Marshall Motor Group has been a Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) user for 6 years and only needed to refresh their infrastructure once in this time period. However, once the refresh was completed, Marshall Motor Group faced an incremental increase in Tivoli resources which resulted in extra pressure on their infrastructure and a rising number of problems within their TSM environment. "Our TSM was under considerable pressure and the whole department was facing daily challenges. And as we didn't have the relevant experience or resource, we needed to plug these gaps to ensure business continuity," explains Rob Carter, IT Manager at Marshall Motor Group.

 

Rob and his team set about looking at external resources and approached Silverstring. "I was personally aware of Silverstring's vast experience in TSM and I knew that we could find a simple solution by employing their services to look at what we do."

 

Silverstring undertook a TSM Healthcheck to identify the current state of their TSM and lead to recommendations to address the current issues whilst planning future improvements.

X-FAB are the worlds leading foundry group for mixed-signal semi-conductor applications. X-FAB creates a clear alternative to typical foundry services by combining solid, specialised expertise in advanced analogue and mixed-signal process technologies.

There was a direct requirement to link-up seamless communication between X-FAB’s multi-national sites. There was the traditional WAN option but Riverbed and Silverstring had a cost-efficient and robust option for X-FAB. Silverstring and Riverbed worked together to implement the wide-area data service for them.