The ANZCO Group is a billion dollar meat processing, marketing and exporting business, grown by acquisition and operating under six brands. The business operates around the clock at sites throughout the country, and includes marketing offices overseas. As a result, there is tremendous reliance on an available IT service
The company was concerned about the Group’s reliance on a single rurally located data centre. Network links into the site were approaching full capacity, and major service outages from inclement weather and disrupted power supplies were becoming more frequent. The data centre itself lacked the necessary capacity and robustness.
ANZCO’s IT Manager, Mark Rance, engaged Gen-i Project Services to define a “business continuity” roadmap – a set of measures directly aimed at ensuring better protection of the IT asset.
The roadmap Gen-i developed had the following components:
- A re-architecting of ANZCO’s existing IT infrastructure
- Transfer of core IT infrastructure assets into a secure, fully managed data centre environment
- Strengthening of the business capability to continue operating in a situation of prolonged IT service outage
- Preparation for a future geographical split of the hosted IT infrastructure across two major centres.
Gen-i’s role was to develop and evaluate options for achieving the desired objectives, and to translate these into a business case and recommendation for business stakeholder approval. This business case was informed by a key piece of analysis – Business Impact Assessment. This analysis quantified the potential financial impact on the business if ANZCO allowed status quo to continue.
Once the strategy received the green light, the Gen-i Project Manager mobilised a Gen-i/client project team to deliver the first two elements of the strategy – re-architecting the existing server and storage infrastructure to achieve higher levels of hardware fault tolerance, and transitioning the resultant systems into a Telecom hosting facility. The production IT infrastructure was effectively re-architected “in situ” i.e. without the benefit of a development environment. The risk to business operations was minimised by careful planning and good communications between the teams.