Logicalis

Logicalis Implements Consolidation Strategy for Acquisitive Paper Manufacturer, St Regis

The Client

St Regis Paper Company Limited has four paper mills throughout the UK with a combined output of nearly 1 million tonnes of paper products per annum. Part of DS Smith Plc, St Regis has 1700 employees and is recognised as one of the UK's largest manufacturers of recycled paper.

The Challenge

St Regis' previous IT infrastructure, spread across seven sites, was increasingly creating complex and costly management and integration issues for the organisation.

Robert Notley, IT Director, St Regis comments “With five server farms spread across the UK, we saw the opportunity to reduce the travelling time spent by IT staff conducting routine maintenance and management. Our goals were to simplify the management of our IT estate, de-duplicate and maximise our existing, and underutilised, assets – servers, software licenses and staff resources – ultimately making the organisation more efficient.”

St Regis' IT strategy was to create an infrastructure that would combine four essential elements; consolidate the server sprawl, centralise management and maintenance of the entire IT platform, minimise call systems non-availability and support a disaster recovery programme.

The Solution

St Regis turned to trusted technology partner, Logicalis, to design and implement a consolidated data centre environment.

“Through our existing relationship with Logicalis, we knew they had the technical expertise and high level of consultancy to meet our goals. Plus, they already understood the intricacies of the business and our processes. This enabled us to collaborate and design a unified data centre solution that is closely aligned to our business needs,” adds Notley.

Working alongside St Regis' IT team, Logicalis centralised the core IT infrastructure, migrating servers and storage, into one primary data centre, and consolidated all systems to a common platform of IBM infrastructure.

The Benefits

The solution has enabled St Regis to centralise and refresh its IT infrastructure on a tightening IT budget, whilst reducing the management complexity of its IT operations.

In addition to lower maintenance costs and reduced management complexity, St Regis now has a scalable IT infrastructure enabling them to replace legacy systems with more up to date ERP that can support the company's growth and their consolidation strategy.

Notley adds, “By centralising and consolidating our systems we have significantly reduced the time, effort and cost spent on IT management and maintenance. In undertaking this project with Logicalis we have created a more manageable and reliable infrastructure for the business to maintain operations.”

In February 2008, St Regis acquired the New Thames Paper Mill, resulting in a 260,000 tonnes increase in production per annum.

An IT infrastructure blueprint developed in conjunction with Logicalis has enabled the New Thames Paper Mill to be easily absorbed into the business, quickly and seamlessly integrating new business IT systems with the current IT infrastructure.

Future

Logicalis and St Regis are now in the process of replicating this success into a second data centre in support of a disaster recovery programme. In the event of systems not being available, the secondary data centre will be activated and operations will be switched virtually seamlessly.

With a mirrored data centre, disaster recovery will become part of the wider business strategy at St Regis. Able to switch between data centres on a continual basis, St Regis is making disaster recovery testing a regular business procedure and can ensure maximum uptime for the organisation during critical IT maintenance work. In the event of systems not being available, the dual datacentre environment will ensure that St Regis remains operational, providing minimum downtime for all its critical business systems.