Lincolne Scott 

Lincolne Scott is a building services and environmental engineering consultancy that is recognised for its leadership, innovation, integrity and vision across the Asia Pacific region. Integration and collaboration are key elements of design and delivery at Lincolne Scott.

Lincolne Scott is involved in building and designing environmentally friendly building such as The Bond, Hawaii’s LEED Platinum building and the NELHA Gateway Energy Centre. The company employs more than 450 staff across 12 countries across the Asia Pacific region.  Recently in 2007, it was acquired by London-based WSP.

For nearly a century, Lincolne Scott has been providing integrated building systems solutions that provide healthy, pleasant and safe environments for their occupants. They have created building designs that are efficient and economic in their use of capital and natural resources, to build, own and operate as well as minimise the impact on the environment.

Business challenge

From a technology standpoint, Lincolne Scott was experiencing issues with multiple legacy systems running key business applications including financial packages and terminal services. With storage and physical space constraints, their aging ICT infrastructure needed a major overhaul.  Power consumption and cooling requirements in their data centre were also increasing exponentially. Data#3 was engaged to assess the situation.

“Our business challenge was to get a highly scalable yet reliable infrastructure but at the same time keep cost down. It also had to save us space and be environmentally friendly,” said David Corbet, IT Manager for Lincolne Scott.

The Data#3 Solution

After assessing the situation, Data^#3 recommended the installation of the HP Blade System c7000, allowing Lincolne Scott to mix and match their storage and server requirements as needed. In addition, the Blade servers also used less floor space, less energy consumption and cost less to operate which made it the right fit. With the help from Data^#3 consultants, Lincolne Scott’s set out to consolidate all their rack mount legacy servers and move them to the HP Blade System c7000.

"We recommended the HP Blade System c7000 because it fitted in well with Lincolne Scott’s requirements. The machines are easy to install and the solution offers virtualisation which means that applications can be migrated easily from one simple box,” said Mark Esler, General Manager for ICT Product Solutions, Data^#3.

Mr Esler said that the HP Blade System c7000 requires very little effort when it comes to installation. It took less than a month for Lincolne Scott to migrate all services. Data#3 helped kick start the project with the initial set up and Lincolne Scott’s IT department migrated the rest by themselves.

The HP MSL LTO3 Tape Library was chosen for its reliability and ease of use, providing complete ready-to-use backup solutions, easy installation and high-capacity data per cartridge.

“We were really impressed with the machine. It took us less than a day to learn how to install the servers,” said Mr Corbet, adding that the company fitted nine blade servers and two storage servers in just one box.

"This solution provided us with a better than expected outcome. Data^#3 worked extensively with internal staff providing guidance, training and implementation support to meet this challenge head-on. This gave us the ability to deliver a solution to the business in the shortest time possible,” he added.

Benefits

Lincolne Scott realised a number of benefits including increased storage space, improved manageability, increased scalability, reduced operating cost and power consumption.

Improved Service Delivery

The recommendations by Data#3 had a significant impact on Lincolne Scott’s IT environment. With a standardised environment, Lincolne Scott can have all their storage, servers and network functions in one box, with the flexibility to meet demand with little effort.

“By reducing the number of devices we need to manage from 18 to nine, it makes it easier for us to manage the environment,” he said.

"An important advantage of the new blade technology is the reduction in physical cabling. Since each of the nine servers has its network ports virtualised, Lincolne Scott’s IT department can easily add or move servers to the c7000 blade system enclosure with ease,” added Mr Corbet.

With the redundant network switch modules, there is no compromise with performance and simplicity of administration. This means better service delivery to the business.

Reduction in operating costs

The whole solution provided a positive outcome for Lincolne Scott. As well as reducing costs, Lincolne Scott now has a more scalable operating environment, better operating systems with improved efficiency.

“We can easily add more applications on and deploy them to our sites worldwide,” said Mr Corbet, adding that they made a savings of more than $15,000 in operating cost by implementing the HP Blade servers.  He added that the HP Blade servers were much cheaper to run because it consumed less power and required less physical space.

Looking forward

Due to a recent acquisition by WSP, Lincolne Scott plans to look at integrating and consolidating their IT operating environment in the next couple of months. The investment in the HP Blade system platform will assist the company in achieving its IT consolidation strategy and return lower IT operating costs and help support a reduced carbon foot print.