Client Background

Central Garage are based in Newport and are the Islands premier Citroen dealership. The company has approximately 15 PC’s spread amongst their Admin, Sales, Services and Parts departments. Central run a bespoke LOB (Line of Business Application) specifically geared at the motor trade.

Client Requirement

DataSwift received a call from Central Garage explaining that one of their servers had gone down and users were unable to print, use the Internet or access files. Although not an existing client, DataSwift sent engineers to site immediately to assess the situation. Our engineers were able to determine a fatal motherboard fault on the ageing Windows 2000 server, which was causing the server to power off after only a short period of being booted. Fortunately the LOB application runs on a separate server and our engineers were able to perform a temporary fix on the network to allow users to access LOB, Printing and the Internet.

Our engineers took the server back to our office for further diagnostics.

 DataSwift’s Solution

Our team immediately went to work. Firstly a brand new server was specced for the client, including backup device, software and Microsoft Licensing. Because of the criticality of getting the new server in as soon as possible and with the least disruption, our engineers decided to attempt to image the existing server. Our engineers were able to keep the existing server online long enough to take a full image of the machine. This was then converted for use under VMWare player. When the new server arrived we were able to join it to the existing domain and migrate all data from the existing virtual server machine.
We then delivered the new server to site. The existing machines then only required minimal configuration change to allow them to work with the new server.
This negated the need to build a new domain from scratch and fully re-configure all of the workstations. This in turn saved time and money for the client.

Benefits

• Central Garage suffered minimal downtime, our engineers were able to ‘patch’ the existing network to allow most day-to-day business activities to continue
• The whole process of sourcing, setting up the new server, and migrating data took less than 4 business days
• New server provides more data redundancy and protection compared to the previous
• New more robust and reliable backup solution

Conclusion

Central Garage have a new more robust and reliable server that should last for many years. The company did not suffer any major downtime, so suffered no loss of earning during the incident.