dsp have worked with many highly reputable and well-known clients, and have achieved incredibly successful results on all projects.

1. 08701 999 377

2. METROLINE
Summary
08701 999 377
The IT department at Metroline ensures the
technology infrastructure is in place so that the
company can run their fleet of over 1,200 buses
and carry over 250 million passengers each
year in one of the world’s busiest cities.
dsp were chosen not only for the management
of the upgrade, but to also provide continuous
managed services. This enabled Metroline to
improve their business processes, maintain
critical systems whilst managing budget
expectations.

3. METROLINE
Requirement
08701 999 377
Metroline needed assistance in overcoming a myriad
of issues such as the limited resources to cover the
maintenance of the E-Business Suite which caused
difficulties when key staff were away as well as there
being no automated monitoring or altering taking
place to manage the system.
Metroline essentially needed access to the skills of
an experienced DBA and not have to employ them on
a full time basis.
Underpinning this was the need for guidance on
Oracle backup and disaster recovery.

4. METROLINE
Solutions
08701 999 377
The initial objective for dsp was to ensure
that the application and database were
seamlessly upgraded and the necessary
backup and recovery solutions were
implemented. The delivery of this was on
time and to budget which gave Metroline
the confidence that dsp were the right
technology partner for them.
The second phase was to ensure that there
was a level of support provided to maintain
the systems and databases.

5. METROLINE
Business Results
08701 999 377
One of the core benefits of the Managed Service
offering for Metroline was the priority 24/7 access
to pool of expertise. This catered for all
fluctuations in the resources which included the
impact from holidays, sickness and training leave.
The second key benefit was the cost savings due to
the need for an extra E-Business Suite DBA,
developer and functional consultant was
eliminated.
Above all, Metroline had the peace of mind that
they were managed by an experienced team of
professionals.

6. 08701 999 377
“dsp have become our Oracle
partner of choice. They are
committed to providing quality
consultants, advice and support
and do so in a professional and
caring fashion. With a recent
successful upgrade of the E-
Business Suite, we certainly feel
very comfortable with dsp.”

7. IISS
Background
08701 999 377
Systems failure is simply not an option for the
International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS),
which is the world’s leading authority on politcal-
military conflict.
Behind the scenes private meetings and public
global conferences attended by world bodies are
facilitated by IISS. They depend on access to real-
time applications;
cross global communications; and an IT
infrastructure that is always on and does not lose
data – ever. As non-profit organisation, conference
hosting and organisation offers IISS a critical
revenue stream.

8. IISS
Background
08701 999 377
In 2011, IISS set out to build a high
availability architecture for the enterprise,
based on Citrix Xen Desktop 5 and VMware 4
as a virtualization solution, capable of
transforming desktops and applications
into an on-demand service for the several
thousands of users that can access the
system at conference time.
This architecture underpins the whole
business. It has a crucial role in supporting
the real-time availability of the applications
which facilitate the conferences.

9. IISS
The requirement
08701 999 377
dsp first set out to understand IISS’ goal.
This was to achieve availability which was
tolerant of a site outage- whether caused
by a network communications failure, loss
of a server, a storage area network (SAN)
or complete data centre.
The requirements specified 100 per cent
data recovery in under one minute
delivered as a scalable solution on a
standardised platform.

10. IISS
The solution
08701 999 377
Working with the hardware and infrastructure that IISS had already purchased, dsp
carried out an assessment and recommended a geo cluster solution featuring
geographically dispersed servers that can failover from one to another or from one
data centre to another within 30 seconds, which is as fast as the technology allows.
The solution was designed and built based on a four node Multi Instance Failover
Cluster using SQL Server 2008 R2. Technically challenging to design and build, geo
clusters are often described as “high availability Nirvana for Windows.”

11. IISS
Business Benefits
08701 999 377
Benefits at a glance:
• 100 per cent availability
• Failover in 30 seconds
• 60 per cent reduction in hardware
• 60 per cent reduction in database
instances and software costs
• Tenfold increase in performance
• Standardised, and easier to support
• Self-funding from savings

12. 08701 999 377
“Over the years we’ve worked with
many third parties. dsp is one of the
most professional- once timescales
were agreed they were met every
step of the way.”

13. 08701 999 377
www.dsp.co.uk
14 Floral Street
Covent Garden
London
WC2E 9DH
United Kingdom