Interview: Simon Hill, IT director, Viridor

Delivering optimised IT services to a large number of small sites stuck in the middle of nowhere is a constant challenge for a growing waste management and recycling company

Simon Hill is IT director for waste management and recycling company Viridor, which has grown its operations to over 320 facilities across the UK by acquiring many of its smaller rivals.

However, while that expansion may have improved Viridor's market share, incorporating all those additional sites, ICT contracts, applications and other hardware/software resources into some form of cohesive infrastructure presented several problems. One of the biggest challenges Hill faced was how to guarantee application performance at remote sites with very limited bandwidth.

What application performance problems did Viridor face?

Hill: The problem was specifically with our weighbridge application, a third-party app that runs over RDP which we have since migrated to Citrix.

Because of the sites' geographical locations – lots are landfill sites in old quarries where few network carriers reach – they had just 256Kbit/s or even 128Kbit/s of bandwidth. Getting extra capacity out to them can be extremely expensive.

There were some sites with a weighbridge and only four or five people, meaning we couldn't justify the cost of a leased line.

For example, we were quoted a six-figure sum in terms of ancilliary charges for one of our sites in Devon.

The app could cope fine if it was just the staff on site using the bandwidth, but if that site hosted a meeting for several regional managers – where they would all connect their laptops to the network – the weighbridge app would stop working and vehicles could not be processed, meaning staff had to revert to manual methods.

How did the IT department solve those problems?

We needed to be able to protect critical apps when the network was being saturated – make sure HTTP traffic was prioritised lower down the stack – which is where Ipanema's platform came in, delivered as one half of Cable & Wireless's Application Performance Management service with Cisco's Wide Area File Service (WAFS) providing the other half.

We've just renewed our contract with C&W for five years, and Ipanema is rolled into the master service agreement, billed quarterly.

How is Ipanema's platform configured and what does it do?

The 130 sites are set up according to a typical hub and spoke topology with the datacentre in Taunton and all the remote sites connected into it via the Cable & Wireless Cloud. We have a physical resilient pair [of Ipanema devices] in the datacentre, but we are able to deploy remote engines to remote sites – there is no kit [dedicated hardware] there, so there are significant costs savings.

The virtual engine does not provide reporting to the same extent as a physical engine, but it is enough for us.

It means we have no software client working on site, just a central server configured to view all the network sub segments.

The software gives us a more granular view of the traffic on the network whereas before we had bandwidth statistics but we did not really know if there were performance issues on the network.

Now we can log into the software and see IP traffic flows and identify potential issues without requiring third-line support engineers to look at them.

What benefits have you noticed so far?

It is a continual improvement process. The Cisco WAFS piece does file caching, you leave it alone and it does its thing but with Ipanema we can refine it as we go along by altering specific parameters to provide the best end user experience, especially as you add new applications to the stack. At first we set fairly lenient server response times and bandwidth requirements for application sessions, reviewed on a monthly basis.

Interview: Simon Hill, IT director, Viridor

Delivering optimised IT services to a large number of small sites stuck in the middle of nowhere is a constant challenge for a growing waste management and recycling company

What we have done since is try to tighten those parameters to make the software work harder. Working with Citrix we had some problems around printing performance – the weighbridge app hooked to external printers for each ticket and we were seeing some delays in those tickets being produced. But we found we could quickly prioritise that traffic correctly by putting it in the right user class.

Printing would not normally be a high priority for that specific application, but the granulation is so powerful we can even prioritise JetDirect traffic.

How big is the IT team at Viridor and how has the helpdesk been affected?

The volume of support calls has not dropped off, but I would say we are able to resolve incidents faster. We still rely on a small ICT team but we have come a long way in a short period of time. I was appointed head of IT three years ago, at which point we had 11 staff and no dedicated network support. Now we have 27 staff and a network from Cable & Wireless that is managed down to the client edge router, so we do not need to get involved in the Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) side of things at all.

What other IT challenges did Viridor face and what have you achieved so far?

They are more around the strategy side of where Viridor is going with IT. When I took on the role, it was about reactive support and firefighting because that was all we had the capacity to do.

But then we provided a report to the board saying if we wanted to extract the true value from IT we needed to make clever investments and use it as an enabler, and part of that was setting out the organisational structure of the team.

We have done a lot of work to improve governance across the department, bringing in an information security officer for example, and improving the way we deliver IT projects using formal project management methodology and business steering groups to understand what our needs were.

What's next on the technology roadmap for the company?

We are currently consolidating the application stack. Viridor is an acquisitive business so we end up with lots of disparate systems and we are working hard to review and consolidate those and consider where we can look at more integrated solutions. We are also looking to outsource our datacentres and move to a private cloud environment hosted by a third party.