Carpet Court - Case Study

Carpet Court boosts service to clients by consolidating its IT infrastructure with VpsCity.

By outsourcing its core IT infrastructure to VpsCity, Carpet Court has reduced costs, improved its services and, most importantly, created a platform for achieving high performance. The company’s IT operation is now more closely aligned to its business goals and better positioned to enable continuous business improvement.

Retaining customers and building a loyal customer base has become top priority for all businesses. To meet these needs, VpsCity helped Carpet Court to integrate their branches and gain a single view of the operations for effective management and control. Its service, provides an optimised solution to the operation as the need was to leverage technology to nurture business growth.

Business Challenge

Carpet Court provides household and lifestyle solutions to New Zealanders, they are leaders in wood, laminate, vinyl flooring and carpets. So, when they started experiencing delays in delivering services to clients because of logistics and their IT infrastructure failures, Carpet Court realised that it required a robust, scalable and a highly available IT infrastructure for hosting their applications. With its IT infrastructure scattered at separate locations, managing logistics and having a control over operations became increasingly difficult. Therefore, Carpet Court wanted to consolidate its IT infrastructure with a single service provider to accelerate IT deployments, streamline processes, reduce operational costs and gain better control over operations.

Value Proposition

Carpet Court felt that the advantages converged IP communications offered in terms of both cost savings and greater business agility could not be ignored. In order to guarantee delivery to its customers against its strict service level agreements, Carpet Court needed to be confident that any new network would be robust. Given the value and business critical importance of the transactions it manages, network security was also a key concern. Carpet Court therefore needed a technology partner that could not only design and deploy the new network but also manage and maintain all its elements, and guarantee its integrity. The success of the migration in terms of minimal disruption to business was of critical importance to Carpet Court, and so it needed an experienced provider that it could trust. After an extensive selection process, VpsCity emerged as the clear leader.

The decision to choose VpsCity as their IT hosting service provider was based on:

• One of the few service providers capable of acting as a ‘one-stop shop’ to manage their mission critical IT infrastructure
• Offered a state-of-the-art carrier neutral data centre with an impressive 99.9% uptime
• A full skills and performance analysis predicted higher capabilities to support the migration process than most other service providers
• The template driven program management proposed by VpsCity was comprehensive to help consolidate the existing IT setup – enabling Carpet Court to resolve their existing challenges and aid in their growth and expansion
• As VpsCity’s data centres were located in Auckland, proximity to its location was an advantage.

Carpet Court’s core application suite is hosted at VpsCity’s facility in Auckland. VpsCity’s certified data centre has helped alleviate the security concerns Carpet Court had with regard to hosting their core application suite with a third-party service provider. VpsCity and Carpet Court teams worked collaboratively to ensure a seamless migration of the core application suite from the earlier service providers to VpsCity’s data centre. With its IT infrastructure being managed by VpsCity, the outcome has been a significant improvement in running of its IT operations.

Solution

Deploying a new network infrastructure and an IP telephony system for Carpet Court to provide clients with advanced services.   

The company opted for VpsCity’s Cloud services. The core application is now hosted at VpsCity’s data centre in Auckland and is made available to their branches on a combination of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.

Solution Snapshot

IT Network Infrastructure

A Private Cloud For Shared Success

The solution revolved around a fully managed private cloud. Our hosted private cloud enabled Carpet Court to have more control over their data and meet the requirements of the industry. This private cloud environment was orchestrated to handle computing, networking, security and storage — all hosted and replicated in two synced data centre locations. 

From the engineering to the monitoring and patching, VpsCity fully manages the environment. We host the backup solution and web presence in the data centre as well, which makes VpsCity responsible for day-to-day IT operations. 

Even after the successful installation, VpsCity continues to help Carpet Court refresh, adjust and enhance their hardware to accommodate growing demand. Carpet Court upgraded their hosted facilities to include faster storage, increased security and optimised data encryption. 

How We Delivered

VpsCity gathered and collated all necessary information to build the network infrastructure, this aided the entire migration process. VpsCity leveraged the Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), powered by a Windows Server operating system, to deploy remote desktop services that provided employees at Carpet Court the flexibility to access their corporate Windows 2012 R2 desktop and application environment running in the data centre on thin clients. We decided to explore the use of thin clients rather than traditional computers at Carpet Court for a couple of reasons. The majority of the users perform support services and development tasks for Carpet Court. For data security reasons, all computing was going to take place on fixed workstations within all the branches across New Zealand. It was a compelling use case for server-based desktops. Data storage security and backup was administered by the VpsCity CloudDrive. The VpsCity CloudDrive assists with all backup and data retention purposes, a seven year data retention plan is in place. VpsCity delivers this through a proprietary backup solution. With the help of detailed network performance reporting and class of service profiling options, VpsCity structured a Wide Area Connectivity solution to Carpet Court, delivered via Fibre/VDSL, this was an ideal solution to improve the performance of its applications, drive down network maintenance and management costs and increase workplace productivity amongst all branches. The structured end-to-end network management including alerts, device monitoring, fault and change management and environment reporting provide an end-to-end experience for Carpet Court.

Features of VDI thin clients at Carpet Court

For users at Carpet Court, all the virtual desktops are centrally located, making it easier to control access to confidential data. In addition, the office environment is strictly controlled and standardised. Users enjoy the reliability, data protection, and disaster recovery capabilities provided through the server applications. Shared memory is used to store and backup all desktop data.

Through user state virtualisation and application virtualisation, users can easily create an office desktop environment connected to user accounts and stored. By deploying enterprise applications and information security to the virtual machines (VMs), VDI technology helps to ensure that confidential information stays within the VM.

IP Telephony System

VpsCity designed and deployed a new network infrastructure and a state of-the-art IP telephony system for Carpet Court. VpsCity standardised on Cisco switching for the new network infrastructure. The telephony solution includes four hundred Cisco IP handsets for internal use and can scale to thousands of internal and remote handsets at any one time. The Cisco Extension mobility function is used to allow the rapid deployment and configuration of IP phones. Four servers support the IP telephony services in a high availability set up. The system supports Call Management and Voicemail as well as a custom greeting feature with IVR and custom call routing. It also supports both a Fax2email and Email2fax feature and conference facilities to cater for ten conference rooms. However conference rooms can be scaled to as many as required. All VOIP endpoints are managed and deployed from the VpsCity network, and the helpdesk support team in the Auckland data centre. The telephony system provides interconnected phone lines and high quality calls. VpsCity provides full support services for the IP telephony systems and infrastructure.

How We Delivered

The installation was part of a refresh of the entire IP network by VpsCity, and it was staggered over a period of twelve months for the entire network of Carpet Court branches around New Zealand to minimise disruption. The staggered migration of users from analogue to IP telephony gave Carpet Court the opportunity to redesign and upgrade elements of the IT infrastructure to improve overall business performance. The network structure was standardised on Cisco Switching at all Carpet Court branches. All of the phones were installed before the system went live to ensure any glitches were addressed beforehand. VpsCity engineers who deployed the solution led Carpet Court and their team through the process at the same time. Through this Carpet Court gained a working knowledge of the systems and corresponding expertise. VpsCity’s CEO, Tarquin Douglass, ensures knowledge transfer continues on an ongoing basis. 

Benefits

• Cost benefit from consolidation of applications and their hosting
• Efficiencies from streamlining of IT operations with a single service provider
• Scalability and flexibility of facility and IT infrastructure to accommodate future projects and growth
• Highly available connectivity - Carrier neutral infrastructure with 99.9% uptime
• IT Team could focus on enabling core business activities
• Secure infrastructure.

Key Takeaways

Today, Carpet Court hosts its critical business application at VpsCity, and has the flexibility to expand their service portfolio based on the business demand. The partnership with VpsCity has enabled Carpet Court to enjoy a robust, secure, scalable and a highly available IT infrastructure that allows it to offer uninterrupted services to its clients. Additionally, a flexible cost structure has helped the company to derive significant cost benefits. Carpet Court now has a better control over operations and has been able to streamline processes and reduce operational costs. With its IT infrastructure being managed by VpsCity, the company is assured of smooth and hassle-free operations and is able to focus on growing its business.

If you would like VpsCity to streamline your business in a similar way that we have done for Carpet Court, then contact our team of experts today by filling in the below form.

"The solution from VpsCity takes away the pain and cost in managing infrastructure services and constant upskilling of technical staff. We no longer have to worry about maintenance tasks, server hardware purchasing, keeping up with the latest equipment and software patching. One of the great aspects of the service is the access to Enterprise grade equipment at reasonable monthly charges."

Adam Cooke, Head of IT at Carpet Court NZ