Disaster Recovery

For more than 30 years a Midlands-based family company has been providing cutting-edge warehouse management software and transport management solutions to the logistics industry, including some very well-known names. From carpets, consumer goods, chilled foods and much more besides - including on one occasion a whole shark! - tmWare's customers rely on the company's technology, tech support and industry know-how. The software offers a comprehensive 360-degree solution for 24/7 warehouse and transport management, ensuring orders are efficiently picked, packed and dynamically scheduled for collection and subsequent on-time delivery by road, rail or air.

In 2005, the company took advantage of the new opportunities emerging with cloud-based computing to effectively re-engineer the delivery of its flagship tmWare solution by making it available as a hosted software as a service (SaaS) platform. This provided more affordable and secure web-based access to customers, empowering users with a user-friendly format and allowing the ability to rapidly scale in line with business needs.

Challenges

In 2016, faced with increasing demand and expectations from customers and the need to maximise the future performance, low latency, scalability and security of its tmWare SaaS platform, the company decided to find a new home for its IT servers. At the time these were housed in a colocation data centre based in London Docklands.

"Over the years, we have continually strengthened our position with tmWare now one of the market's most dynamic and flexible platforms," explained Lyndsey Phillips, Managing Director. "Our clientele typically falls into two categories, those with straight forward processes requiring minor setup configuration and others with complex, bespoke needs. We cater to both, collaborating closely with our customers to tailor the setup to their business requirements. In all cases, continuous and responsive IT availability, software scalability and security are of paramount importance for keeping their wheels turning."

The Solution

Host-IT has been providing colocation services within its own data centres since 1995. The company supports many types of clients both technical and non-technical including SMEs, large multi- nationals, local authorities, not for profit organisations, IT service providers, and web development companies.

tmWare's multiple servers are strategically located at Host-IT's data centre within the colocation campus owned by Proximity Data Centres in Milton Keynes. This is a purpose built, tier 3 standard 48,000 sq ft facility with multiple data halls. Providing 3 MW of available power, the site offers low latency connectivity via multiple tier 1 carrier connections including dark fibres with fully diverse links.

New requirements

In 2023, as the company looked to the future including targeting smaller warehouse and delivery organisations, an additional major IT requirement was identified: The migration of its Disaster Recovery (DR) backup systems to a more secure and modern data centre environment.

"We've always hosted our DR in house but based on our positive experience with Milton Keynes, the relocating of our eight DR server systems and back UPS has made a potentially hard decision a lot easier," said Kieron Coughlin, Technical Director at tmWare. "We already have a safe pair of hands in Host-IT, furthermore, they have a new data centre conveniently sited in Birmingham. Therefore, we will redeploy our DR equipment there in early 2024 which will be connected by a high-speed fibre network to our Tamworth office and the Milton Keynes data centre."

Host-IT's new secure ISO 27001, Tier 3 facility is strategically located in central Birmingham, close to the major fibre networks traversing the UK and various regional fibre providers. There is currently 6MW of IT power available to site with the potential to increase this to 12MW.

Business Benefits

With thousands of pounds of business at stake with every order fulfilment and delivery, tmWare is mission critical to the performance of their logistics customers who are constantly reassured by tmWare's strategic investment in the services of professionally run, highly resilient and secure colocation data centres.

"In the seven years since entrusting tmWare to Host-IT we have enjoyed a highly professional and personalised service as well as an excellent uptime record," concludes tmWare's Lyndsey Phillips. "Their consistently excellent service and ability to support our current and future needs in a timely manner gives us every confidenceas we look to expand our customer base. Equally, in ensuring the high levels of trusted IT delivery we provide to our existing valued customers."

Key Hosting Partner Criteria:

• Scalable and low latency hosting facilities
• Secure operations and compliance credentials
• Proven Infrastructure
• Second site DR hosting
• Personalised and responsive support services
• Price-competitiveness

Following a thorough evaluation of the market for a new hosting services provider, Milton Keynes-based Host-IT was selected. "Although we considered various other potential partners including global providers, we chose Host-IT following a tour of their highly impressive data centre facility," said Commercial Manager, Alan Evitts. "We also liked their very professional and personalised approach to customer service."