We have been employed by Altius Associates (private equity advisor) since its formation over 20 years ago. It comprised offices in London (30 users), Richmond, VA (USA) (30 users) and Singapore (8 users). We re-developed and built its server infrastructure in all three offices, and maintained & supported all three and their 70-odd users throughout this period.
Originally, the existing London internet connection was a 2 mbps leased line costing over £11k p.a.
The poor performance of the existing VPN connection to their US office in Richmond was causing daily difficulties, working on shared documents across the Atlantic.
Alternatives? The existing ADSL infrastructure wasn’t available in Victoria, and even if it had been, suitable or sufficient for this purpose.
However, the hosting locations such as Telehouse in the City were sitting on top of enormous internet pipes. But how to get there?
The answer was provided by Fibernet, via a dark fibre. By “dark”, it meant that it came with no services. Ideal. We could put our own switches at either end of it, and “light” it, extending the office LAN over this Gbps link to the hosting location. A rack was rented in Telehouse, and the existing server infrastructure split between the London office and Telehouse, from where a super-fast internet connection was available.
Not only did this mean that extremely fast internet connectivity was available, but it provided Disaster Recovery and site/server resilience into the bargain.
Extending this further, we deployed VMware vSphere and converted the physical servers to virtual servers. This enabled us to run servers in either location, and migrate between them. Not only that, but Datacore SANsymphony real-time synchronising storage was employed between the two locations.
This meant that not only could the server load be distributed between the 2 locations, but if either location went down for any reason, the other location could take up the load instantly and automatically. Site and server resilience.
VMware vSphere was also deployed in the Richmond VA office, although the same data centre facilities were not available there.
For the Singapore office, with only 8 users, the server infrastructure was built in the cloud, using Microsoft Azure, hosted on Microsoft’s Asian hosting locations to maximise performance for those users.
Eventually, Altius was purchased by Pavilion Financial Corporation in Montreal, and our work continued for them. Finally, Pavilion in turn was purchased by Mercer, part of Marsh & McLennan.
ART Computing was a key support to our team as we established and grew Altius until the company was acquired. It was then instrumental in the integration of our IT with that of Pavilion and subsequently Mercer.
We worked together to design, create and implement a robust IT infrastructure with global reach. They were prepared to do everything from basic desk support, to high level IT strategy and everything in between.
Jenny Fenton - former co-CEO of Altius Associates
