Trinity Expert Systems won the outsourcing deal to become The Phoenix Group’s single IT service supplier. This required them to build a green field Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) in a hosted cloud environment across two data centres, one in Birmingham and the other in London Docklands GS2. They also needed a complete server virtual infrastructure and storage to take on the financial institution’s line of business applications including Microsoft Exchange.
I initially joined the team to design and implement the storage solution based on NetApp FAS storage controllers. Once I had configured the NetApp infrastructure I moved on to became the Technical Lead on the project to ensure that both data centres were fully built ready for the user migration. Including being heavily involved in the data migration and re-permissioning using a mixture of tools including PowerShell scripts.
SnapManager products for Hyper-V, VMware, Exchange and SQL were implemented to backup and replicate the storage between the two data centres. The solution ran on HP BladeSystems with FlexFabric modules providing a mixture of iSCSI, FC and FCoE utilising Converged Network Adapters (CNAs). The VDI system was based on Citrix XenDesktop. The fibre channel fabric was based on HP rebadged Brocade switches.
Part of the solution was not supported on Hyper-V therefore I designed, implemented and supported a VMware vSphere 5 environment across the two data centres.
I implemented a combination of NetBackup and BackupExec to backup this infrastructure to tape including encryption. These products were also used to migrate data from the previous services company supplying Phoenix.18