The data centre had grown faster than the standards holding it together
A data centre modernisation and Commvault backup estate for one of the UAE's largest diversified groups, delivered without operational interruption.
The challenge
Al Ghurair Investments spans manufacturing, real estate, retail and financial services, and its data centre had grown with the group. Cabling ran without standards, power and data were not segregated, racks were cluttered and hard to service, and the backup posture no longer matched the risk a diversified group carries. The constraints were practical: the existing HP Enterprise servers still had life in them and were to be kept, disruption to operations had to be minimal, the turnaround had to be short for business continuity, and at the end the in-house IT team had to be able to run everything without us.
What we built
A team of more than eighteen specialists ran the work in four phases: assessment and design, infrastructure revamp, backup implementation, then stabilisation and handover. We rebuilt the estate to industry-standard structured cabling with power and data segregated, reorganised and labelled the racks and optimised airflow, integrated the existing HP servers into the new layout on Cisco networking rather than replacing hardware that still performed, and deployed a Commvault enterprise backup and recovery estate across the group with centralised management. Documentation and knowledge transfer ran alongside the build, and the first year of annual maintenance was included so the handover had a safety net.
What remains
The group runs on modernised, maintainable infrastructure with an enterprise backup posture its auditors and insurers can evidence, delivered without operational interruption and at a cost kept honest by reusing hardware that still had life in it. What remains is an estate the in-house team owns: documented, labelled, recoverable, and ready to scale without repeating the clutter that made the revamp necessary. The decision to keep the HP servers rather than replace them was made in the assessment phase, on evidence, and it is the reason the programme finished inside a short window without a procurement cycle in the middle of it.
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