Water treatment company Feedwater has turned to IT consultancy Polymorph to revamp and streamline its existing technology, aiming to improve the efficiency of the organisation.

Feedwater was established in 1976 and is a UK-based manufacturer and supplier of water treatment chemicals, equipment and water softeners. It looks after the needs of industrial and commercial customers who use water in manufacturing processes and building service applications. Feedwater’s product and service range protects steam boilers, cooling towers, heating and chilled systems and clean water supplies from problems caused by scale, corrosion and microbiological fouling. It was also an early pioneer in the identification and prevention of Legionnaires’ Disease before most people had even heard of it.

Feedwater has a decade-long relationship with Polymorph, relying on the company to support its IT services. Polymorph also helps Feedwater with software development and works with the in-house IT team to create detailed, business critical applications.

At the start of 2012 the decision was taken to upgrade Feedwater’s IT infrastructure at its head office in Wirral, North-West England. At its core this meant replacing aging equipment such as servers, which needed to be upgraded in order to run new applications. This entailed a near-complete refit, encompassing everything from cabling through to the back-office systems necessary for the infrastructure upgrade.

For the first time, Feedwater also looked at virtualisation as a means to consolidate its existing technology and improve the efficiency of the organisation.

With a decade-long relationship in place, one based on trusted delivery of IT services and support, Polymorph and Feedwater worked collaboratively to identify and develop the proposed upgrade path. At its core lay a migration to a virtualised environment.

Optimising Feedwater’s investment in the server hardware, Polymorph set about consolidating the separate virtual machines onto two physical servers, to meet the current business needs whilst providing sufficient capacity for future growth.

VMware was initially installed at a base level, which allowed for snapshot backups and fast deployment of additional future servers should they be required. For Feedwater, this gives a level of flexibility for the platform to grow with the business.

Polymorph also implemented an additional server room within a separate building onsite as part of the virtualisation migration: this is extremely important for business continuity, with native Microsoft Windows services ensuring data is replicated across the buildings. So if a server suffers fire or flood or any other catastrophic failure, a fully functioning back-up server keeps Feedwater operational at all times, vital for both business and customers.

The key benefits of the new infrastructure, and in particular the virtualised servers, include flexibility, resilience and reliability. With a more efficient, secure IT infrastructure, Feedwater can now rely upon continuous access to its business-critical IT applications. Insurance providers look favourably upon businesses which have good disaster recovery plans in place, and Feedwater’s provisions against the risk of server failure makes the business much more resilient.

So with this major infrastructure upgrade, Feedwater has invested wisely in a robust yet flexible infrastructure to prevent business disasters caused by server downtime or other IT problems.

“Polymorph identified our business and IT needs and delivered exactly what we agreed on, on time and with good technical support and follow-on training for key staff. They provided us with a virtualised solution that will not only save us money in future on hardware replacement and software licensing costs, but will also help our business to run more efficiently on a more reliable, robust, crisis-proof infrastructure.

All done with the help and support of experienced and knowledgeable team members who guided our staff through every step.”
Martin Revans, director, Feedwater Ltd