Iomart Hosting Carries Out Group Wide Virtualisation For Office2office

Cloud computing and managed hosting services provider iomart Hosting has announced that it has carried out a group-wide virtualisation for office2office (o2o), the sole provider of offices supplies and Closed Loop document recycling services for the UK government.

A series of acquisitions over the last few years saw o2o's IT environment became extremely fragmented.

Vincent Cassidy, Group IT Director for o2o, explained: "As we made new acquisitions I knew we needed to reduce our risks and put in a scalable platform. Essentially we needed to evolve from a traditional IT department that was just keeping the lights on, to a flexible IT infrastructure that added value for our customers, enabled us to adopt more modern technological processes and allowed flexibility for future growth."

o2o decided to fully outsource its IT and selected iomart Hosting to carry out the rationalisation. A large migration was undertaken which involved moving 200 servers into iomart Hosting's London data centre. This group-wide virtualisation has vastly reduced o2o's server hardware. There is a large VMware platform with built in backup, which provides the group's DNS services, Active Directory plus SAN storage. There are also two dedicated database servers - an MSSQL Cluster and MSSQL Mirror.

"It was quite a complex migration but it's been a smooth and comfortable process," explains Vincent Cassidy. "The support we've had from iomart Hosting has been excellent. The technical staff have been very responsive, superb in fact."

Sarah Haran, managing director of iomart Hosting: "What we have created for o2o is a resilient and secure environment which supports its on-demand business model and mitigates the risk of unacceptable loss of IT systems. We have provided a platform that allows for greater group-level consolidation which should significantly reduce o2o's existing internal operating costs." 

o2o's largest subsidiary Banner Business Services Limited was awarded a £37m annual contract to be sole provider of office products and services under a new framework contract to supply central UK Government departments. 

Vincent Cassidy said: "The decision to outsource our IT infrastructure to iomart Hosting came at just the right time. As we win bigger and more complex contracts it's great to know that we have got a hosting partner that is prepared to go that extra mile for us."

iomart Hosting is a subsidiary of iomart Group plc (AIM:IOM) which was ranked as one of the best web hosting companies in the world by HostReview.