London Stadium is a multi-purpose outdoor stadium at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, providing fans with access to music, sport and entertainment in a world-class environment.
-
INDUSTRY: Public sector
OBJECTIVE: London Stadium required a revised storage solution to address ageing infrastructure limitations, a problem resolved by DTP Group through the implementation of the HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution.
IT MATTERS: Provide relevant infrastructure to improve scale, storage and compute. Embed resilience and scale into infrastructure with HCI platform. Integrate HCI into legacy architecture within a tight deadline. Trusted failover on a sensitive and scalable network.
-
APPROACH: Implementation of a comprehensive HCI platform to deliver streamlined compute and storage that’s sustainable and futureproof.
BUSINESS MATTERS: A cost-effective compute and storage platform that’s futureproof and resilient. Superb performance and resource optimisation. Intelligent and hyper-efficient functionality optimised to meet very specific virtualisation workload requirements.
-
“London Stadium required a futureproof and dynamic storage solution that would meet our changing business needs,” says Anthony Fontivero, IT Manager at London Stadium. “We had also just officially become a publicly funded organisation and so the project had to work within a public procurement process.”
This meant the organisation needed to overcome two main hurdles – ensure that any proposed solution would meet their requirements over the long and short term, and ensure the project met with strict public procurement guidelines.
London Stadium had grown and evolved over the years, which meant that it required infrastructure that would allow for improved scale, storage and capability. The company had to resource and implement the right technology and ensure it used an approved service provider that aligned with its budget and technology guidelines.
-
Fontivero says: “We had to traverse the complexities of public procurement while developing a spec sheet that we believed would meet our requirements. Interestingly, out of all the companies that took part in the tendering process, DTP was the only one who challenged us on what we had written. It was really peculiar. DTP came in and said, ‘actually, we think we know what you’re asking for’, and they went ahead and modified our solution. And they were right.”
DTP Group won the pitch as it was the most cost effective, offered the most relevant and cohesive solution, and recognised the importance of long-term resilience for the company. Ensuring that the final approved solution ticked every mandated box, DTP implemented HPE SimpliVity HCI, designing the platform to deliver the expected levels of storage, server and compute.
-
RESOLVING THE CHALLENGES OF SUSTAINABLE INFRASTRUCTURE
The solution had to meet London Stadium’s key objectives of:
- Storage
- Security
- Compliance
- Speed
- Resilience
- Longevity
- Cost
- Implementation deadline
- Minimal to no service disruption throughout implementation
-
There were several hurdles that had to be cleared to ensure that London Stadium met these objectives. The first was to implement a solution that was resilient and sustainable – it had to evolve with the company over the long term while meeting stringent performance and system expectations. It also had to be implemented within a tight timeframe while ensuring that the business didn’t experience significant downtime or disruption. London Stadium was fully booked for events throughout the installation and it was vital that systems remained operational during the process.
-
EMBEDDING THE FUTURE INTO INFRASTRUCTURE
DTP’s solution was very different from the one outlined in the tender process. DTP believed that the right solution should be a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) that would deliver the compute, storage, resilience and functionality that London Stadium wanted. As Donald Campbell, New Business Sales Executive at DTP Group explains: “We wanted London Stadium to achieve measurable business outcomes that would align with their cost expectations, fit in with their existing infrastructure and deliver more than just a top line layer of value.”
Initially, the company was unsure of how the HCI platform would deliver its key objectives. “There are so many variables with HCI and things you need to have in place to ensure it works, but DTP made sure we could achieve our objectives while staying within our budget constraints,” says London Stadium’s Fontivero.
-
The solution was implemented within deadline and cost parameters, ensuring minimal disruption to London Stadium services throughout. In the event of an issue, DTP collaborated closely with the IT team at London Stadium to ensure that it was resolved at speed.
“DTP collaborated with us to overcome some significant roadblocks. One was ensuring seamless connection of the HCI solution to our infrastructure. We hadn’t accounted for some technical problems that would have potentially impacted on project deadlines and delivery dates. However, DTP sourced the technology we needed and did so faster and cheaper than any of our current suppliers.”
The result was a solution that met every one of the company’s key objectives while building a long-term relationship between DTP and London Stadium.
THE FINAL RESULT
The shift to the HPE SimpliVity HCI platform not only optimised storage and compute for London Stadium, but delivered these at exceptional speeds within tight cost frameworks. The solution has a high de-duplication rate that far exceeded the company’s expectations and is achieving all the goals set out in the original tender process: resilience, speed, ease of use, security and accessibility.
“DTP has been instrumental in helping us identify what we need both now, and in the future,” concludes Fontivero. “We sleep a lot better knowing our systems have the resiliency and security we need, and we are very happy with HPE. In fact, we are looking to overcome other challenges within our infrastructure and we plan to stick with both DTP and HPE to do so.”
CONTACT US NOW
-
-
SOLVING IT TOGETHER
-
SOLUTIONS
-
AS A SERVICE
-
SECTORS
-
