Overview:

The existing Rolls Royce datacentre had been in place since the late 1980s and was no longer fit for purpose. Rolls Royce contracted Hewlett Packard to migrate and modernise their disparate technology clusters within the existing datacentre and migrate to a pair of world-class, modern, highly resilient and secure HP datacentres. Hewlett Packard did not have the in-house expertise required to deliver certain technology silos on the programme and required external assistance as they were in danger of missing key deadlines.

The challenge:

Fuel Recruitment were approached and asked to supply a team of 30 contractors comprising of Technical Architects, Technical Leads and Project Managers. Our team had to be available immediately as they were required on site within 2 weeks of the initial request and due to the nature of the Rolls-Royce business and the urgency of the role, the whole team had to be SC cleared. Our team were required to have high-level skills in Wintel Infrastructure, Virtualisation, SAN and Backup Solutions, UNIX Infrastructure, Cisco Network Infrastructure, Oracle and SQL and their remit was to design, build and migrate the new datacentre infrastructure and decommission the existing infrastructure.

What we did:

The success of any project is largely dependent upon the quality of the brief. We staged a briefing with our client where we established the core criteria of the requirement, the capabilities required to carry out the requirement and also to gain a greater understanding of the organisational culture, values and policies of our client. On a daily basis we held a resource meeting internally to discuss the progress and challenges of each of the roles and this enabled us to allocate resource effectively, ensuring we met the needs of our customer.

Within the space of 2 weeks, our Consultants had identified and vetted the entire project team – all with the required level of Security Clearance.

The outcome:

The team worked with the HP programme board, Rolls-Royce project managers and the Rolls-Royce Architecture Review Group to design solutions that met the new architectural standards required and the entire team were instrumental in the success of the programme.  They delivered some of the first key phases within 7 weeks, even though the suggested timescale was 7 months, saving the end client an estimated £1 million.