Business Situation

As part of an ongoing drive to cut the company’s £80 million IT management costs, BG Group embarked on a strategy to create a sound, cost-effective infrastructure that would deliver against the current and future needs of an evolving business. Given the legacy infrastructure and vast mix of standalone departmental business systems handed down from the old British Gas days, this presented a large challenge. This task was made even more difficult by the global nature of BG’s business and the company’s insistence that all projects must:

• Provide value for money
• Scale across all operating businesses globally
• Improve business efficiency and profitability and deliver operational excellence

The BG server estate numbered 240 servers supporting 1,900 users – a ratio of eight users per server with a corresponding overhead of one printer per user. A fundamental part of getting a sound, cost-effective infrastructure in place was the delivery of structured data strategy supported by a robust – but streamlined – server infrastructure. This server infrastructure would have to act as a global template but still meet the business imperatives of BG Group.

Solution

The baseline for the project was established using Avanade’s Server Consolidation Assessment. This tool aided the development of the business case and assisted to define the scope, which included:

• Implementing Active Directory for authentication/group policy management. This also acts as a master directory for future management and application implementations.
• Replacement of OpenVMS with Windows 2000 clusters reducing management overhead from 26 to 4 nodes and integrating both Unix and Wintel data repositories.
• Extension of the server resiliency model across multiple data centers to provide business continuity even in the event of a site outage.
• Implementation of a Storage Area Network (SAN) to provide high capacity (initially 1.4TB) data volumes to Windows servers.
• Reduction of the server estate from 240 to 150 servers, and NT Domains from 14 to 2 implementing a proactive, pre-emptive management model.
• Production of a rapid server provisioning architecture that allows new servers and server configurations to be deployed quickly and in a standardized resource in new page fashion.