S3 Consulting insures Markel's virtual environment

Milton Keynes-based VAR completes insurance firm's Veeam deployment

Virtualisation specialist S3 Consulting has used Veeam's technology to help insurance firm Markel International overhaul the management of its virtual IT environments.

The Milton Keynes-based VAR used Veeam's nworks Management Pack to provide Markel with an insight into the workings of its VMware vSphere virtual infrastructure using Microsoft's System Centre Operations Manager (SCOM) tool. As a result, the firm's IT estate can now be managed through a single console.

The bulk of Markel's IT is housed within two datacentres which contain 37 physical machines. It also includes VMware ESX hosts for 450 virtual servers, which run applications used by 600 of the firm's staff.

Chris Bullock, chief executive of S3 Consulting, told ChannelWeb that, despite the project's size, the deployment was fairly straightforward.

"Our consultancy approach means that we can engage at any point in the lifecycle of a project and add value," said Bullock. "[The customer] had a large VMware environment, but our team had the experience and knowledge needed to tackle any challenges this may have presented and move the project along with ease."

Peter deVoisey, technical support manager at Markel, said the project had allowed the firm to streamline its operations. "By integrating with SCOM we have a single view of our entire IT infrastructure with consistent reporting of issues and centralised reporting of any errors that arise," he explained.

"As a result, we no longer need to juggle two separate solutions and can focus on our core task: ensuring that the risk of IT disruption is as far from Markel's infrastructure as possible."