T2 - Infrastructure and Refresh Project
Client Overview
T2 offers Australia’s biggest range of beautiful, fragrant teas from around the world. T2 offers their wide range of teas through their 20 plus retail store network and a select array of quality restaurants, cafes, hotels, food purveyors and corporate clients around the globe.
With over 20 stores located throughout Australia, a global wholesale network and a 24/7 online ordering system via the internet, a highly available infrastructure was a vital component in minimising disruption to their core business strategy.
Situation analysis
Kiandra IT conducted an initial review of the T2 network infrastructure and identified two key issues:
• T2’s entire server infrastructure was running off one VMware server
• Key performance load during peak operating hours was insufficient in matching the demand
T2 had already invested a large amount of capital beginning the process of virtualising their infrastructure. Kiandra were conscious that its infrastructure solution must continue to leverage off this investment without over capitalising in the short term.
Kiandra completed a full review of recovery times in the current environment, and discovered that it would take between 24 and 72 hours to recover the network to an operational state after a complete system failure. Results showed that T2 could potentially experience data loss of 24 hours dependent on the type of failure experienced, a sizable business risk for a customer service based company.
Kiandra solution
Kiandra designed a sustainable solution that replaced the existing VMware server and redeployed it as a backup system. Additional new multi-cored VMware servers were implemented and connected to a HP LeftHand iSCSI SAN. Incremental database backups run through the day lowering the potential data loss window to less than 4 hours in a complete system failure. Kiandra’s SAN and VMware solution allowed for minimal capital expenditure in the short term while providing the agility to expand rapidly to meet the growing and evolving needs of T2.
Delivering benefits
Prior to its partnership with Kiandra, T2 had made the wise decision to begin investing in virtualising their infrastructure, but the initial design of the network didn’t offer the scalability or high availability that T2 required.
Upon procuring the new infrastructure, Kiandra ensured the migration to the new system was painless and had no impact on T2’s business operations. Kiandra set up a migration strategy that involved moving one application/system at a time which allowed for critical review of the system for any issues. As Kiandra migrated each service to the new infrastructure T2 immediately gained the performance and recoverability benefits without further reconfiguring.
Kiandra’s approach to centralise the infrastructure to multiple replicated iSCSI SANs meant that T2 were able to see immediate performance gains and received the comfort of having a completely redundant solution for their server fleet.
The cost benefits the Kiandra solution provided T2 over a traditional fiber channel SAN, allowed them to make the immediate investment in SAN infrastructure with the flexibility to grow the solution in the future. Utilising iSCSI SANs also provided the ability for T2 to open additional offices, replicating data between the sites as required using the inbuilt iSCSI replication technologies.
A critical aspect of all solutions considered for T2 was the need to be highly available. Running a 24/7 online store, in addition to retail stores located through Australia, meant that any downtime of the infrastructure would result in lost revenue for T2.
By creating a flexible, completely redundant architecture for the refresh, T2 could feel secure in the knowledge that downtime would not only be minimised but completely avoided in most cases.
T2 is a rapidly expanding company and required a solution that was cost effective in the short term so they could focus their capital on growing their retail outlets and customer base. Kiandra’s infrastructure solution enabled T2 to purchase additional hardware and integrate it with the underlying core infrastructure to expand their processing power and redundancy, with minimal configuration changes required.