Beacon Homeloans
Category: Contract Roles

Role:

  • Employed at Beacon to perform the end-to-end Infrastructure design for the implementation of two new multi tier Windows based applications. Led project planning and management of the implementation of the design, and installation and build of all servers, storage and network, resulting in BHL server estate moving from 20 servers to over 100 servers (including 40+ Virtual Servers)

Key Achievements:

  • Performed a design review of the original solution which resulted in cost saving of over £70k in hardware and software (£310k budget)

    • My first task at Beacon was to review the current design proposal and make recommendations. The initial design was proposed by the software vendor and included a number of technologies not required for size of the implementation. My review identified areas where BHL could save costs and helped to ensure the project infrastructure was fit for purpose.

  • Completed final design of a fully resilient server infrastructure using HP Blade servers and Windows Server 2003 and MS Virtual Server technologies.

    • Once the design review was completed, I produced an updated design where all non production environments were implemented as virtual servers. The Design included the implementation of a separate network solution, a new backup solution and iSCSI based storage infrastructure solution.

  • Multi environment design including Live, System Test, UAT, Development and DR

    • The design and implemented solution consisted of 5 dedicated standalone environments. Due to the utilisation of virtualisation, each environment was built with exactly the same number of servers, thus reducing errors during testing and development.

  • Installation, build and configuration of the solution.

    • Due to the small IT department at BHL, I took an active part in the racking, stacking, build and configuration of the network and server infrastructure. We built a BHL standard Windows Server 2003 virtual machine and physical machine and used these as templates for the others servers ensuring each server was configured identically. The virtual machines all resided on iSCSI volumes mounted from the central Windows Storage Server.

Core Infrastructure:

  • Hardware:

    HP Blade and Standalone servers, 3COM Networking

  • OS

    Windows Server 2003, Windows Storage Server

  • Software

    MS Virtual Server, iSCSI, DPR Mortgage Application

Tags:

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