Barbour waxes lyrical over IT infrastructure improvements

Barbour is a household name

J Barbour & Sons is a household name - at least for any household that likes outdoor pursuits.

The firm was founded in 1894 and has always been based in South Shields in the north-east of England. Barbour manufactures wax jackets, waterproof breathable jackets, wools, quilts, shirts, knitwear, trousers and accessories in more than 40 countries worldwide.

When the company decided to renew its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, several key objectives for its underlying infrastucture had to be met before the project could be deployed.

Full resiliency, better performance and lower total cost of ownership were the top three aims which drove the IT rollout.

Barbour's head of technology Neil Thursby said that any system had to give the firm end-to-end IT and business support, 24x7.

"We can’t afford to have any embedded inefficiencies in our IT rollout and we had to tick all the boxes on performance, dependability and cost savings on reduced energy use,” he said.

Thursby said Barbour also needed to provide a number of Windows-based servers and additional storage capacity.

"We spoke to several vendors and quickly confirmed that a storage area network (SAN) combined with virtualised servers met our requirements perfectly, " he said.

Barbour's IT advisor Croft Technology was given the job of scrutinising the competitive commercial proposals. After weighing up the options together, Barbour decided that an HP BladeSystem would achieve its aims, as well as be more reliable and energy efficient.

The BladeSystem chosen for Barbour's primary site was a c7000 model, which accommodates multiple server and network designs in one enclosure and reduces cost per server and power consumption when managing hardware virtualisation.

The system now operates across four physical servers and has a capacity to take an additional 28 half-height blades.

Barbour is also using an HP StorageWorks 4400 Enterprise Virtual Array, allowing dynamic storage expansion and an HP StorageWorks MSL4048 tape library for unattended backup, archive and disaster recovery.

Barbour runs Windows 2003 Server software, virtualised using VMware ESX 3.5, with Fibre Channel connections to its SAN.

Thursby said that since the new system serves Barbour locations worldwide, resilience is key.

"We installed a primary system in our head office and a secondary system in a separate facility. Hardware-based replication is used to keep the two synchronised," he said.

Thursby also highlighted the green benefits of the new hardware.

"We see a blade-based server solution as key in reducing power consumption and cooling requirements within our two datacentres.," he said.

The two locations are linked by a fibre network connection running at a combined downlink and uplink capacity of 2Gbit/s, giving diverse fault-tolerant routes. To further improve resilience, Barbour has contracted for a fully managed multi-protocol label switched (MPLS)-based solution for international communications.

Currently Barbour is replacing its ERP system, but has wider plans over the coming months.

"Having seen the benefits of virtualisation first-hand, well be looking to move our standalone servers to this environment," said Thursby.

"The new hardware has been installed for several months and we are delighted with the flexibility it gives the business."