Redcentric and Direct Technical have worked together for many years, providing a wide range of services to Direct Technical’s end clients. We caught up with Bob Gilchrist, their Managing Director, after Redcentric successfully handled a managed infrastructure migration to hear his first-hand experiences of working with Redcentric and build this Q&A.
The scope of the project was to replace the network routing, firewalling and switching in our full-height rack at the Gatwick data centre.
We recognised that our expertise is in servers and storage, but we found that we were too often engaged in routing, firewalling and switching issues. It was a surprise to us to find faults in equipment from a major switch vendor. A switch stacking failure at 1am was the final straw – and so we looked for a single provider of support for the network infrastructure. We contacted Redcentric and found a willingness to help us. We composed a detailed statement of requirement and Redcentric provided a proposal that we thought would work for us and our clients.
I was concerned with the fact that the migration needed to be minimally disruptive for our clients, some of whom work 24/7. We had several team meetings with the Redcentric technical department and together structured a plan which would see the work completed over four successive weekends. We put this plan to our clients who agreed to it. In the event, we managed to complete it in 3 weekends, due to the willingness of the great Redcentric team to work together with us.
The low level of issues exceeds my expectations and I regard the project as a resounding success. We were one of the very first customers in the Gatwick data centre. It continues to be a pleasure to work with the Redcentric technical team, who we find to be enthusiastic, diligent and responsible.
The aim of this project was to provide our clients with the reassurance that their infrastructure was monitored and maintained, 24/7, with an engineer always on call.
It continues to be a pleasure to work with the Redcentric technical team, who we find to be enthusiastic, diligent and responsible and importantly, good communicators.
I wish I had thought of making this change earlier than we did – I would have had fewer sleepless nights! I encourage other hosted businesses to consider the benefits of outsourcing monitoring, management and maintenance of vital network infrastructure to a team who have a focus and expertise in routing, switching and firewalling.
