Background:
Founded 20 years ago, Richmond Events Limited specialise in organising high profile networking events at exclusive locations and on luxury cruise ships. With offices in London and New York, Richmond Events’ core value proposition is to provide a better, more relaxed way for buyers and sellers to engage with each other. This approach has seen attendees returning year on year.
“When the time came to expand our infrastructure, we needed a partner that was qualified, trustworthy and cost effective. Firstserv proved themselves as an ideal partner.”
Liam Quinn, Managing Director of Richmond Events
A key part of this success can be attributed to the IT systems that Richmond Events have in place to support their business. Over and above the internal infrastructure that provides standard facilities such as Email and document management to the end users, Richmond Events also provide a number of online services that enable organisations to register their attendance at events and give individuals the power to book focussed meetings with the right people.
For any company reliant on their web strategy there are a number of key factors that must be taken into account, including performance, reliability and unparalleled security. These are all of paramount importance and if compromised can potentially damage the business’s hard earned reputation. More than aware of these challenges, Richmond Events chose to utilise the expertise and infrastructure of a hosting provider to deliver their online services.
“As a rapidly growing business, our customer facing web servers are beyond critical. When the time came to expand that infrastructure, we needed a partner that was qualified, trustworthy and cost effective. Firstserv proved themselves as an ideal partner.” – Liam Quinn, Managing Director of Richmond Events
Solution:
The initial remit of the contract was to host and manage Richmond Event’s online services, whilst also increasing the number of Oracle servers to support the increased volume of queries and customer transactions. One of the most important requirements, however, was to provide a seamless transition from the incumbent supplier onto the Firstserv platform, which necessitated precision planning and execution.
In order to achieve this, the Firstserv team engineered a solution based around Parallels Virtuozzo; a virtualisation tool that would significantly help to mitigate the risks of the deployment and minimise, if not eliminate, any loss of service from the customer’s perspective. This plan was summarised in an initial scope of work, which was then agreed by Richmond Events and any influential third parties to ensure that everyone involved was aware of their responsibilities, the timescales and most importantly the deliverables.
“We were given a target and the commercial, technical and sales resource all came together in achieving that goal on time and within budget.” – Gordon Kenneway, Director of Support Services at Firstserv
By utilising Virtuozzo, Firstserv were able to encapsulate copies of Richmond Events’ existing front end web servers in a portable virtual image, which were then migrated onto a consolidated hardware platform. By the very nature of virtualisation technology, these now virtual servers were able to make the most efficient use of the processing power and memory that had been assigned to them, and happily co-exist on the same equipment.
Once this was in place Firstserv worked in conjunction with third party Oracle developers to build the extra databases that process all the online queries and transactions. Copies of these servers exist in both a “production” and a “test” capacity, and they reside on dedicated physical hardware, which, like all of Firstserv’s offerings, is located in secure data centre facilities. This setup and the critical data are then replicated between multiple sites, with load balanced connectivity provided by multiple carriers that guarantees the performance and availability you would expect from a Tier-1 provider.
These servers process vast amounts of sensitive data, so security is important. In addition to the physical security provided by the data centres, the Richmond Events online infrastructure now sits behind market-leading Cisco firewalls, VPN concentrators and inline intrusion prevention systems that permit access to authorised users only.
Benefits:
“They respond quickly and resolve any problems in a very effective manner and to top it off we’re saving somewhere in the region of £30k a year compared to our previous supplier. They’re professional, efficient and helpful”
Liam Quinn, Managing Director of Richmond Events
The benefits of utilising data centre services are pretty clear. The infrastructure, expertise, security, and controlled environment required are things that most businesses cannot afford to replicate in-house in order to have the reliability and uptime they need for such critical services. In the case of Richmond Events and Firstserv the traditional data centre environment, combined with the innovative use of Virtuozzo, delivered numerous other advantages as well:
- A consolidated hardware platform that reduces power consumption and costs
- The scalability to support the businesses online strategy now and in the future
- The capacity to take additional services to market quickly and with minimal risk
- A platform that incorporates failover and disaster recovery as standard
Liam concludes “Since moving over to Firstserv the level of service has been fantastic. They respond quickly and resolve any problems in a very effective manner and to top it off we’re saving somewhere in the region of £30k a year compared to our previous supplier. They’re professional, efficient and helpful and they’ve been a real joy to work with.”
As the contract between Richmond Events and Firstserv moves into its second year, and as virtualisation becomes a more widely adopted technology, there are endless possibilities for this already successful partnership to evolve, as it moves from strength to strength.