The Company

The Signcraft Group is Australia’s leading signage company providing innovative, customised signage solutions and corporate imaging throughout Australia, New Zealand and the South East Asian region. Operating for over 30 years with multiple locations across Australia, the group’s services include design, permit procurement, project management, manufacturing, installation and sign maintenance for a wide range of well known companies, such as Mercedes Benz, ANZ Bank and BHP.

The Challenge

As the business expanded, it became apparent that a scalable, flexible solution was required to manage the existing server environment. Multiple applications and services were hosted on a number of aging servers, making it difficult to support and maintain various business systems as well as having limited capacity for new system
deployments. Adding more physical servers was proving to be a costly exercise with maintenance, cooling and equipment costs estimated well over the IT budget. The Signcraft Group relies heavily upon its infrastructure to run all facets of the business, from client communications to the scheduling of works within their manufacturing facilities and has reached the point in operations where server failure and any downtime would result in a massive profit loss to the business. The existing server environment was at a very high risk of failure and Michael Baljak, (Signcraft’s Chief Financial Officer) approached JASCO with his concerns.

The Solution

JASCO has been providing services to the Signcraft group for over 9 years and when presented with the challenge at hand, discussed various options with Michael. The most obvious and cost saving solution was to Virtualise, as the price comparisons indicated that for a fraction of the cost of replacing the physical servers and implementing a SAN solution, JASCO would be able to reduce the amount of physical servers by 70%, providing a Hyper-V solution along with a SAN solution, including the deployment of System Centre Enterprise Suite, an Exchange 2010 Upgrade and the deployment of OCS 2007 R2. No disruption to service was experienced at all by the Signcraft Group, as a result of all work required to establish the new virtual environment was performed parallel to the running production systems, with the cutovers from the old to new environment completed out of hours.

The Benefits

Besides having saved over $120,000 on the Virtualisation project alone, the Signcraft Group is now enjoying immediate benefits through lowered costs pertaining to server  maintenance, increased data center space, a greener IT environment and the security of a scalable, reliable infrastructure. They also expect to save as much as $30,000 in the near future when implementing an ERP solution. Using Microsoft Virtualisation technology has enabled the Signcraft Group to pave the way for trouble- free implementations, resulting in less application compatibility issues and larger savings on license fees.

Operating within this new Virtualised environment is seen ,as quoted by Michael, an absolute godsend to the business.

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