The Royal Mint, the historic, government owned organisation which manufactures coins for the United Kingdom, has turned to IT consultancy firms Polymorph and Celerity to upgrade its IT systems in time for the Olympics.

The problem:
The Royal Mint is an historic, government owned organisation with more than 1,000 years of experience. It is the world's leading mint exporter, with the capacity to make 90 million coins and medals a week, or almost 5 billion coins a year. It supplies coins that are crucial to the daily transactions that underpin life. As a manufacturer, exporter and employer it has a real stake in the industrial life of the nation.

Its first responsibility is to make and distribute United Kingdom coins as well as supply blanks and official medals. With the Olympic Games taking place in the United Kingdom in 2012, the Royal Mint anticipated a 300% increase in its email related traffic. It therefore needed to ensure that its IT infrastructure could meet such demands.

The Royal Mint discussed its concerns regarding the upcoming Olympics with Celerity, seeking advice on whether to outsource its email systems to a third party supplier. It was concerned, having looked at a few other providers of hosted email systems, none of which seemed capable of meeting its requirements. Due to the heritage of the Royal Mint, they needed to ensure that the anticipated increase in mail flow was optimised and highly available, therefore a decision was made to replace their aging Microsoft Exchange 2003 environment with a fault tolerant 2010 Exchange environment.

One of the biggest pre-requisites with the project was that the deployment of the new environment would not cause user disruption and would minimise technical complications to their current working system and environment. The project therefore required first class expertise and project management skills.

Celerity has worked with the Royal Mint in the past, and have a strong working relationship with the team, and so were asked to produce a proposal for the email system based on the released tender. Celerity recommended that they partner with Polymorph, a Microsoft partner with experts specialising in Microsoft Exchange.

The Solution:
Once the decision was made to proceed with the new Microsoft Exchange 2010 environment, Celerity and Polymorph ran an initial technical workshop with the Royal Mint's IT department to discuss the current infrastructure environment and to fully understand what they needed from this new environment. This enabled them to get under the skin of the Royal Mint's IT systems which gave them the knowledge and confidence to propose the best solution.

Only then did they come up with the recommendations on how to successfully deploy the new solution to ensure user disruption was kept to an absolute minimum. Celerity set about designing the hardware infrastructure that Polymorph's Microsoft implementation would sit on.

One of the key requirements for the hardware architecture designed by Celerity was a resilient Exchange system. The Royal Mint has employees located all around the world who communicate primarily via email. Celerity positioned three different solutions, each with differing technology, to utilise either Exchange or VMware Resilience and offer the Royal Mint extreme levels of resilience and ensure constant email for its employees.

Due to the nature of the business and constant use of the messaging environment a phased transition was recommended to the Royal Mint, ensuring co-existence between the legacy Microsoft Exchange environment and the new Exchange environment. This allowed for a smooth transition for end users and ensured that there were no surprises for staff when transitioning onto the new system.

This was to be a complex project that required Polymorph to implement into a live environment. Therefore a four-week period of co-existence between the legacy environment and the new Exchange environment was recommended, whilst a phased transition took place to reduce end user disruption.

Polymorph installed and configured a highly available Microsoft Exchange 2010 environment to ensure the Royal Mint was protected against a single server failure. The Microsoft Exchange 2003 Server was finally decommissioned as part of the project, ensuring the Exchange environment was optimised for mail flow. Celerity and Polymorph then provided post-project support and training to staff to ensure a smooth transition and to prevent any setbacks from occurring once they had handed over to the Royal Mint.

"The Royal Mint were apprehensive of the migration from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010 because of the potential for end user disruption and possible technical complications. To minimise these risks the Royal Mint looked to a trusted supplier to manage this project.

Celerity had implemented several successful projects at the Royal Mint and was entrusted, in partnership with Polymorph, to deliver the Exchange migration. During the lifecycle of this project, the Celerity/Polymorph partnership has shown an expertise in project management, technical knowledge and customer liaison that allowed the migration to be completed in a professional, timely and smooth manner.

Overall, the migration was handled extremely well by the Celerity/Polymorph collaboration," Simon Edwards, IT operations manager, The Royal Mint.

Summary:
Perhaps the most pressing requirement of this project was the need for a smooth implementation that was delivered most importantly on time and to budget. The Royal Mint stated that there were to be no shortcuts taken with regards to the architecture, which is a crucial element of the project and the technology that underpins the entire exchange system.

Celerity and Polymorph worked together to successfully deploy this new architecture and Microsoft Exchange 2010 environment with no user disruption, on time, within budget, and with the desired architecture fully intact.

About Polymorph
Founded in 2000, Polymorph Ltd is an IT software and services company with a track record of providing consultancy, solutions, support and creative design services to meet a wide range of business needs. The company is based in the North West and offers bespoke software, flexible support and maintenance and off-the-shelf packages through three distinct service offerings: Polymorph Software, Polymorph Infrastructure and Polymorph Creative.

Polymorph puts an emphasis on forming close and lasting relationships with its customers, delivering solutions that meet the business objectives and with the users in mind. This allows customers to focus solely on the core of their business.

About Celerity
Celerity is a specialist IT consulting and integration company successfully delivering dynamic infrastructures and proven enterprise class solutions and services since 2002. The company combine established and proven processes, methodologies and products, developed in partnership with industry leading vendors, to provide innovative solutions that transform business objectives into tangible and measurable results.

Celerity has offices in Glasgow, Northumberland, Tyne & Wear, Preston (Headquarters) and Ascot.

This extensive coverage allows Celerity to provide regional, unrivalled technical support and account management to all of their clients and believe it is their personal and flexible approach that sets them apart from other technology partners in the industry.

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