We help you develop an agile, high-performance and flexible ICT infrastructure that will reduce costs, increase efficiency, mitigate risk and help you maintain a competitive edge. We do this by understanding your business objectives and matching them against best practice processes, technologies and service. We then work alongside your IT team to implement the changes needed, transferring skills to your staff during the project.
We’re technology independent, always looking for innovative products that will deliver genuine business benefits. We work with market leaders and newcomers alike, choosing the combination of products and services that’s right for each organisation and reusing its existing products and licences as much as possible to reduce costs.
What makes Fordway different?
Our customers tell us that they choose Fordway because we offer a unique combination of in-depth technical skill and practical implementation experience. We have a breadth and depth of knowledge which is rare in an organisation of our size. When you chose Fordway, you get a mature, experienced team who work seamlessly alongside your own staff to deliver the project on time and on budget.
Even more importantly, we care passionately about what we do. Every customer really matters to us. Our priority is to ensure your infrastructure change is implemented effectively, and we’ll always go the extra mile to ensure we deliver on our promises.
You’ll also find that we’re not afraid to ask difficult questions and challenge accepted thinking.You can rely on Fordway to challenge you at every stage of a project. We want to design and deliver the best solution for your business needs. To do that, we’ll leave no stone unturned – which means asking questions and debating potential solutions with you until we’re confident that you’re getting the best possible result.
With Fordway, you won’t get hype, or waffle, or the latest technology just because someone thinks it’s a good idea. You’ll get a pragmatic approach, a thorough analysis of your business needs and your existing infrastructure and a solution that delivers exactly what you expect.
Challenging conventional thinking
You can rely on Fordway to challenge you at every stage of a project. We aim to design and deliver the best solution for your business needs. To do that, we’ll leave no stone unturned – which means asking difficult questions and debating potential solutions with you until we’re confident that you’re getting the best possible result.
With us, you won’t get hype, or waffle, or the latest technology just because someone thinks it’s a good idea. You’ll get a pragmatic approach, a thorough analysis of your business needs and your existing infrastructure and a solution that delivers exactly what you expect.
Our history
Fordway was established in 1990 by managing director Richard Blanford. He saw a gap in the market for an IT integrator which used mature, experienced staff to tackle the root cause of infrastructure problems, rather than just treating the symptoms with new hardware and software.
More than 20years later, Fordway has grown to a company of xx people with a track record of delivering effective infrastructure solutions to leading organisations.
Cloud migration
Cloud is currently one of the hottest topics in IT. It has the potential to provide significant benefits, including:
• Almost limitless capacity on demand
• Location independence
• Application flexibility
• Increased efficiency
• Cost savings
Fordway believes that, underneath the cloud computing hype, there are some extremely useful concepts that organisations can implement quickly and easily to improve services. Many organisations will find that they are already using some aspects of cloud computing!
The journey to cloud
We recommend moving to cloud computing in a series of stages. Think of it as a journey, not a single process.
The first step is to re-architect your infrastructure as a private cloud serving your user community. This means reducing complexity and optimising the infrastructure using virtualisation and other cloud technologies – improving operational performance and providing significant cost savings.
Our benchmarking studies show that optimising infrastructure can save an organisation in excess of 25% of its annual IT infrastructure budget.
Specific, low risk elements can then be migrated to publicly available services – creating a ‘hybrid cloud’. You will still have and run your own infrastructure, or have a trusted third party running it for you.
Once your organisation is familiar and comfortable with cloud concepts and practices, you can consider moving more services to public cloud. What you decide to move will depend on the nature or your business.
Fordway has assisted a number of organisations on this journey, and can advise you on the key steps to implement a private or hybrid cloud. We would be happy to provide you with an initial consultation free of charge to help you evaluate your options. Further information is available in our White Paper.
Contact information
Address
Hambledon House
Catteshall Lane
Godalming
Surrey
GU7 1JJ
Telephone: 528200
Email: sales@fordway.com
Website: http://www.fordway.com/
Press Releases
Fordway to help London Borough of Brent reduce power consumption by 80 per cent
LB Brent press release v1.docx 18.77 kB
Case Studies
Virtualised infrastructure supports rapid growth of green energy business
Fordway has worked with Intelligent Energy, a rapidly growing clean power systems company, to implement a new virtualised IT infrastructure which has enabled four servers to handle the work of 50 and facilitated real-time interactive product design across two continents.
The amount of data handling at Intelligent Energy has grown more than 80% in the last 12 months. Its fuel cells are at the pre-commercial and early market entry stage, and the company is constantly monitoring their performance so it can fine-tune designs and develop new products. This has generated huge volumes of data over the last 12 years. Fuel cells can be tested for up to 10,000 hours at a time, monitoring parameters such as temperature and voltage, while each system in the field is equipped with a SIM card which sends back performance data regularly, generating many terabytes of raw data.
The company has a ‘knowledge room’ for real time monitoring and predictive asset management, linked to a large database. The information gathered can be used to enable IE to demonstrate to potential partners and customers that its fuel cells are as reliable as alternative power sources. All the raw data has to be analysed and converted into meaningful information that can be understood by those with less technical expertise, which requires considerable server capacity and performance.
“We needed a solution that would adapt quickly to whatever direction the business might take in the future,” said Stuart Gale, server manager at IE. “It was vital that it could be expanded quickly as data volumes increased. The relocation gave us an opportunity to install a completely new infrastructure, rather than move existing equipment.”
Flexible working was another key factor. IE management wanted project teams in different locations to work together as a unit, facilitating the sharing of ideas and speeding up development.
Fordway recommended a virtualised infrastructure based on VMware, HP Networking, a secure Citrix gateway and a Compellent SAN providing virtualised storage. The HP solution provides wireless and management capability, and combined with Citrix enables IE to provision working projects as needed. IE employees no longer need to be given laptops. Instead, they use the secure Citrix gateway to access their entire application portfolio over a web page from any computer, whether in the office or at home.
Supporting designers using large-scale CAD drawings on powerful workstations provided more of a challenge. UK staff had been staying late in the office to work online with colleagues in California. Now, using a combination of Citrix and HP Remote Graphics, the network can deliver full 3D SolidWorks graphics over a thin network and broadband connection to any computer, effectively providing 16GB of RAM and a 2GB graphics card. This enables UK staff to go home to their family and collaborate effectively with US colleagues using their home computer. During design reviews, multiple users can even share a single CAD workstation with no loss of performance.
“We had to transfer all existing data and of course email,” explained Stuart. “Losing email was one of our CEO’s greatest fears knowing what significant business problems this can cause. He wanted to know our contingency plans! Fordway had a plan B but didn’t we need it. We set up the new infrastructure, transferred the email server electronically, unplugged the old server and were up and running in the new environment within 45 minutes.”
The new infrastructure also makes disaster recovery straightforward. Stuart simply switches to the VR site and users can continue to log in remotely and access all their applications. Throughout the project, IE were able to rely on Fordway’s knowledge and expertise. “When we said we needed an infrastructure open-ended and flexible enough to handle unknown levels of growth, they suggested the ideal technical solution using VMware and Compellent,” Stuart explained.
The new infrastructure has delivered everything IE was looking for. Although data volume has quadrupled in the last nine months, the virtualised storage solution has coped effortlessly. Reviewing the total return on investment, Stuart has calculated that the VMware environment has already paid for itself “many times over”. IE’s finance team is also delighted with the new infrastructure. The IT department no longer has to continually justify new equipment, but can budget ahead, ensuring improved financial planning and control. Stuart explained: “We never expected this level of growth in terms of either number of servers or volume of data. The flexibility of the Compellent system has been key, as it’s simple to manage the virtualised environment and provision new virtual servers whenever we need them. We’re running 50-60 virtual servers on just 4 Compellent (now Compellent Dell) servers. A new server typically costs £500 - £3,000. If we’d had to buy one each time we’ve provisioned a virtual server, it would have cost us 3-4 times as much, and the maintenance workload would have been tremendous. We get a lot more out of much less kit!”
Using fewer servers has significantly reduced power consumption and cooling requirements, and upgrades are much easier. Speed of server provisioning is another key benefit. Instead of having to order new equipment, wait for delivery, unpack it and install the operating system, Stuart and his team can get new services up and running as soon as they are needed. They build a new Windows server using a virtual template – which they recently timed at just 54 seconds! The new virtual server is secure, stable and can be snapshotted as soon as it has been set up. “This also reduces the risk of setting up new applications,” explained Stuart. “Once it’s set up, we can take a snapshot, so if there’s any problem we simply go back to where we were without losing data.”
Intelligent_Energy_Case_Studyv2.pdf 312.68 kB
New infrastructure ensures ‘healthy’ data at Hammersmith and Fulham NHS PCT
New storage and disaster recovery infrastructure has reduced Hammersmith and Fulham PCT’s server count by 60% while ensuring 24/7 availability, scalability and faster delivery of new services.
When the IT department at Hammersmith and Fulham PCT decided it was time to implement a new storage area network (SAN) solution, they turned to their network support partner Fordway for a solution. The new SAN needed to handle significant data growth while reducing the number of servers required - reducing power consumption and facilities costs –while also providing cost effective data recovery.
In response Fordway designed and implemented a resilient SAN combined with a virtual server environment which has enabled the PCT to reduce its number of servers by 60 per cent. It also provides straightforward expansion, reduced downtime and faster delivery of new services.
The solution that Fordway recommended comprises a fully resilient and replicated SAN infrastructure linking the PCT’s headquarters at Parson’s Green and its disaster recovery site three and a half miles away. Fordway used a combination of VMWare virtualisation, Compellent SAN arrays and Commvault centrally managed enterprise back-up, tailored to the PCT’s specific requirements.
The new SAN provides all the facilities the PCT needed, including scaleability and flexibility, data replication, thin provisioning and data progressing. It also provides disaster recovery, enabling rapid failover of server platforms to standby systems. Fordway is working closely with Zakaria’s team on service level availability and service continuity management to ensure that the network can hit its service level targets and provide recoverability within defined times.
One of the advantages of the new system is the ability to expand at short notice if needed. If disk and file space become squeezed on one of the arrays, for example, this can be expanded by 500 gigabytes in less than an hour, with no need for any downtime. Meanwhile, the system enables the IT team to manage data intelligently to avoid the need for expansion in many cases, while reducing the administrative time required.
The thin provisioning technology, which eliminates allocated but unused capacity across the network, enables Hammersmith and Fulham to increase its asset utilisation. Physical space is only used when data is written, providing a fast, affordable and environmentally sensitive way to manage storage.
Hammersmith & Fulham PCT.pdf 155.96 kB
Improved IT infrastructure enables Comic Relief to maximise IT budget
Well-known charity Comic Relief needed a new solution to tackle its ever-growing volumes of information. Like many organisations, data volumes were growing exponentially, but Comic Relief faced the additional challenges of an annual influx of new data arising from its flagship campaigns Red Nose Day and Sport Relief and the need to improve operational efficiency and reduce costs to ensure the maximum budget was spent on charitable projects.
Comic Relief knew that it needed to improve its storage capability. The organisation’s distributed storage platform was reaching full capacity, and the ageing infrastructure made it difficult and time-consuming to manage the rapid increases in data volumes, which grew exponentially with each campaign. If not addressed, this would have had a significant impact on the organisation’s ability to continue working efficiently and effectively.
Comic Relief was also running out of physical space to house its servers, so could not simply extend its current infrastructure or replace it with a larger SAN. The new solution needed to deliver greater storage capacity but with a reduced physical footprint.
Comic Relief.pdf 159.28 kB
Helping The RHS to Increase energy efficiency and Reduce operational costs
Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) has upgraded its storage platform as part of an initiative to create centralised access to its library of more than 200,000 images. The new SAN has reduced time and costs associated with sourcing images and created an additional revenue stream for the charity, as well as improving its disaster recovery capabilities.
The RHS requires its IT infrastructure, which includes 40 servers and 600 PCs, to be fully operational at all times so that members can gain entry to its gardens, new membership applications can be handled, transactions at the society’s shops can be processed and suppliers paid. The IT infrastructure also plays a key role in the successful organisation and management of the RHS flower shows, including the society’s annual flagship events at Chelsea, Hampton Court Palace and Tatton Park, which host more than 500,000 visitors each year.
Fordway initially began working with the RHS in March 2007 when it was brought in to deliver a network management project. Following successful completion of the project, the company was asked to design, and eventually implement, a storage area network to meet the organisation’s evolving storage requirements.
RHS.pdf 196.84 kB
Affordable Resilience for the London Borough of Hillingdon
The London Borough of Hillingdon’s IT team approached Fordway to work with them to on their strategy to find effective and greener ways to handle the Borough’s ICT requirements. They needed a solution that would provide smarter working, reduce costs and power consumption and provide increased resilience.
Fordway reviewed Hillingdon‟s ICT infrastructure and together with Hillingdon's team designed and implemented a solution based on virtualisation private cloud infrastructure, which the Hillingdon team have named the “H-cloud”. This has provided substantial increased availability and an effective business continuity solution. As well as providing disaster recovery for the
solution has been extended to provide disaster recovery for Local Strategic Partners (LSPs), and they are now in discussion
other local authorities about providing this service for them, enabling the Borough to share operating costs.
The initial driver for Hillingdon’s ICT review was almost 100 per cent year on year data growth, which had created many terabytes of stored data, and increasing user requirements for new services and improved ways of working. While only ten per cent of this data was mission-critical at any one time, the other ninety per cent had to be available at short notice as it could be required for government reports or to answer questions about legacy projects. The Borough’s existing five year old storage area network (SAN) could not handle this level of data, and the associated IT infrastructure was unable to support the IT team as it struggled to manage growth and prioritise data manually.
The legacy ICT environment was also a financial and power drain on the Borough’s resources. It required an increasing amount of hardware, and the resulting high power consumption was a major issue as the local power company could not supply any more power to the building, leaving no scope to add additional servers. Hillingdon used the opportunity to review all aspects of its ICT, including the power consumption and utilisation of its desktop computing estate – and saw this as the opportunity to implement cloud computing. Having reviewed the market and concluded that most commercial cloud offerings were immature or unfit for local authority use they decided to build their own with Fordway’s assistance in partnership with key vendors.
“The key requirement for any ICT infrastructure is simply that it is fit for purpose and works effectively – which is the basic premise of cloud,” explains Roger Bearpark, assistant head of ICT for the London Borough of Hillingdon.“We found that, by reducing the complexity of our infrastructure using virtualisation and moving to a private cloud solution, we created the opportunity for significant cost and energy savings.”
The Solution
• Automated Tiered Storage provides significant savings without manual classification
• Thin provisioning increases utilization
• Simplified storage management saves staff time to work on more innovative progress
• Scalability for future growth
• Affordable replication solution allows increased recoverability
• Better position to support our users and citizens
• Data Progression Increases Disk Utilisation
• Compellent Replication
The benefits
The new solution has provided a wide range of benefits to Hillingdon:
-
Running over 90% of its servers, or 200 virtual machines, on nine physical platforms, including provision for DR,
cutting the ICT space occupied by 65% and power consumption by over 80% - Saved > £93,000 on its annual energy bill
- Saved the generation of 171 tonnes of carbon emissions each year
- Reduced the 3 year cost per Terabyte of storage by >70%
- Lowered its carbon footprint by 20% over 18 months whilst accommodating the growth required by the organisation.
The entire server virtualisation project for three years’ growth has been funded from a single year’s server replacement budget.
The project has also delivered the green benefits Hillingdon was looking for. The team has calculated that it has reduced the Borough’s carbon footprint by 171 tonnes per annum.
As well as providing effective disaster recovery for the Borough, the solution has been extended to provide disaster recovery for their LSPs. The automated chargeback feature will enable the Borough to recover its operating costs in the not-for-profit agreement it has made with the LSPs.
LBH_Cloud_Casestudy.pdf 391.77 kB
Virtualization has enabled gm2 Logistics to reduce its data center footprint by a third
Server and storage virtualisation helps to simplify data management and ensure business continuity. Reducing the data centre’s carbon footprint through lower power and cooling requirements, leading to a reduction in capital and running costs.
gm2's ageing storage system was struggling to support growing demands for capacity, constantly shuffling data from one place to another, which was very labor-intensive and made it impossible to predict and prepare for changing data requirements. High availability across the company’s 80 servers was also a growing need. Since the company sells around £1.5M of paper a day it could not afford any downtime.
It was clear that gm2 logistics had a traditional data centre – one where they had attempted to respond to growth by adding servers and storage systems dedicated to specific applications, business functions, customers, and geographic locations. Over time, they had created a complex, inflexible infrastructure that was difficult and costly to manage.
To solve this issue, Fordway recommended that they transition to a virtualized server and storage environment. Fortunately, the benefits of virtualisation were well understood by gm2 Logistics: it could help them reduce capital and running costs; it would allow them to be more flexible and nimble in response to market changes; and, as every environmentally-aware CIO knows, it can help reduce the data centre’s carbon footprint through lower power and cooling requirements.
Virtualization has enabled gm2 Logistics to reduce its data center footprint by a third. To achieve this reduction while increasing performance and availability, gm2 Logistics boots physical and virtual servers instantly from the SAN using the Compellent software allowing it to eliminate a lot of redundant hardware from its environment entirely. The end result is that gm2 Logistics is consuming less power, which is great for both the environment as well as the company’s IT budget, this is a particularly important as the company is committed to reducing the environmental impact of its business processes.
GM2.pdf 102.18 kB
Whitepapers
Why private cloud should be your first step on the cloud computing journey - and how to get there
The IT infrastructure within most organisations is unnecessarily complex, the result of successive business decisions taken over many years. The effect is to limit performance, scalability and particularly the ability to adapt to meet changing business requirements. Cloud computing promises limitless capacity, almost total flexibility and increased efficiency – so could it be the solution to your IT infrastructure challenges? And, by moving IT spending from CapEx to OpEx, could it help organisations whose budgets are limited by the current recession? This paper examines how re-engineering your existing IT infrastructure, processes and service delivery as a private cloud serving your organisation, as the first step on the journey to cloud computing, can help organisations cut through the complexity of their existing IT infrastructure. This will enable them to make better use of the facilities they already have and be the start of your journey to cloud computing.
Fordway White Paper - Private Cloud.pdf 1.26 MB
Top Practical Tips to a Successful Desktop Strategy
Desktop virtualisation offers considerable operational benefits and potential cost savings. In spite of this most organisations are still deploying full desktop PCs with locally installed OS and applications for the majority of their users. This is normally due to historical practice, and is where the skills and knowledge of their in house staff are. With most organisations having bypassed Vista, the majority of installed desktops are still on Windows XP, which Microsoft stops supporting in mid 2011. Windows 7 is now here and stable, and there are numerous new and emerging options available which promise better flexibility, management and potential cost savings. What should you be considering?
This white paper is designed to guide organisations that are reviewing their desktop and flexible working strategies through the decision making process. It outlines the process Fordway recommends they take, discusses the options and tools available to assist with these processes, and details the benefits the organisation can expect to receive from following our advice.
Desktop Strategy White Paper.pdf 619.27 kB
