Our most recent project with Gregory Distribution...

Gregory Distribution are one of the largest privately owned transport companies in the UK. Their diverse fleet operates on a nationwide basis, their service is underpinned by continuous improvement, creative solutions and the innovative use of business systems and technology – all geared to delivering their customers’ commercial success. 

We have been working closely with Gregory Distribution over the last 8 months on various projects. They are embarking on an exciting journey to invest and improve their current IT environment and implement a future-proof IT strategy. The latest project we recently completed was a Cisco data centre core switch migration.

Before we started…

 With every critical project we assign an Escalation Manager to manage any critical challenges and ensure the right resources are to hand for a seamless delivery. The Escalation Manager is a direct contact for any customer throughout the entire lifecycle of the project and works with the customer to rectify any issues quickly and efficiently. Given the nature of the project, migration activity can sometimes cause operational disruption; at NetSec we always try to minimise this as much as possible by having a great team in place.

The task…

Gregory’s goal was to migrate from the Cisco Catalyst 3750X platform to Cisco’s cutting edge Catalyst 9500 and 9300 platform. Equipment spanned across two UK based data centres and required our on-site engineering team to perform all aspects of the migration, from racking, stacking, configuration, and testing.

In preparation for this engagement we had to translate the IOS configuration template to IOS XE since some commands have been deprecated. As part of this we also recommended the IOS XE software version to ensure integrity and longevity.

The migration was set out across two separate days to accommodate Gregory’s 24/7 operation. Our engineering team went above and beyond to work unsocial hours and provide confidence to Gregory that the migration would be completed before the maintenance window expired.

Gregory's Technology Security and Infrastructure Manager said :

“Replacing the core switches at our two datacentres was a very high-risk change.
As a 24/7 business we have to keep downtime to a minimum, so having a NetSec engineer assist us with this task gave us the assurance that expert help was at hand in case we hit any unexpected issues.

Having Jon on site meant that we benefitted from his knowledge and experience, his help ranged from simple tasks such as an extra pair of hands to patch network cables to troubleshooting some more obscure issues which we encountered during the work.

Having support from NetSec on site saved us significant downtime and made this complex task a lot less stressful.”

Technical Outcome…

The goal was to achieve a new and improved 10GB backbone to enable enhanced site-to-site interconnect performance, migrate to Cisco’s Smart License model enabling DNA license capability, and the ability to seamlessly integrate with VMware NSX-T, in which micro-segmentation can be deployed.

The value of IT investment for businesses is endless, but these are some of the key outcomes from the work we have done…

  • Increased hardware lifecycle of 10 years +

  • Improved data throughput to allow future growth without infrastructure constraints

  • Ability to integrate with modern solutions such as Cisco DNA Centre and VMware NSX-T to achieve automation and greater visibility of the core infrastructure

We are very happy with the positive outcomes of the migration for Gregory and look forward to our next project with them in the coming weeks. 

It’s been a pleasure working with Gregory helping them on their digital transformation journey. We value building key strategic partner relationships with businesses and demonstrating value add through every project and service we offer.

Stay tuned for some more exciting transformation projects…

The NetSec Team.