Rockingham Motor Speedway.
Rockingham Motor Speedway is a modern motor racing and sports venue in Northamptonshire that hosts corporate driving days, driver training, conferences and exhibitions. It now also provides serviced offices to a number of businesses at its Rockingham Building Business Centre (RBBC).
Experience with distributed IT estate management and support
Track record of several successful hardware rollouts
ISO accreditation and
expertise in managing
security processes
Availability of engineers countrywide
Project Overview.
Due to rapid business growth, Rockingham’s existing IT infrastructure needed updating to incorporate the 24/7 demands resulting from its relayed motor sports events – which have viewers and fans across Europe – and the serviced office requirements of the RBBC’s 20-plus tenants.
As Rockingham grew, its networks, telecoms and broader IT infrastructure were under pressure as an increasing number of spectators and journalists attended events at the venue every week. A Kalamazoo IT managed services customer since 2010, Rockingham turned to the IT service and support firm for expert help in supporting its ongoing growth.
The Challenge.
Zero downtime was a key requirement; Rockingham’s systems were running 24/7, relaying real-time information and timing heats for cars around the circuit countrywide. Because this information was transmitted to thousands of viewers across the UK, Rockingham required 100 per cent system reliability to ensure that communications failure or lack of network access would not adversely affect Rockingham’s reputation and credibility as a racing venue.
Complete reliability was also necessary for Rockingham’s serviced office business – tenants expected and required dependable internet in order to operate their businesses.
An early warning system to help identify and resolve issues was essential to ensure continuity of systems and services. Kalamazoo IT worked with Rockingham’s in-house IT team to ensure the communications services were running as efficiently as possible. Kalamazoo provided dedicated internet lines, offered proactive IT services, and implemented a central network server and backup and disaster recovery solution that was faster than the tape technology Rockingham had used previously.
The Solution.
Having a geographically dispersed team allows the managed IT services provider to assign field engineers to specific territories so they can reach a client within a couple of hours.
Kalamazoo IT consulted with Rockingham’s IT manager, and together, they came up with a way to not only take the stress away from fulfilling Rockingham’s IT requirements but also support the organisation as an evolving business and events centre.
Initially, Kalamazoo undertook an assessment to understand how the business worked and matched Rockingham’s requirements to proven technologies available in the market. As communications to the outside world needed to be faster, Kalamazoo IT installed a dedicated internet line and recommended network switching.
Kalamazoo worked on Rockingham’s network infrastructure, installing and upgrading internet leased lines. To ensure bandwidth capacity, security and flexibility for the serviced offices, Kalamazoo IT switched Rockingham to a virtual local area network (VLAN) and upgraded the RBBC’s network backbone with fibre optic cabling.
Next, Kalamazoo IT delivered a server project, as Rockingham was in need of a higher capacity server to support business growth.
Disaster recovery was another priority, and when discussing software backups over traditional tape backup, it became clear that Rockingham needed recovery capabilities much faster than tape could provide.
Rockingham believed that Kalamazoo IT did such a good job that the company instructed them to manage IT support, and Rockingham has been a support customer ever since.
Benefits.
“We wanted a good, reliable and local company to carry out networking jobs for us. Kalamazoo IT was ideally located – if we had a problem, within an hour or so, Kalamazoo could have someone with the right skills and knowledge to resolve the problem right there and then.
Over the six years that we have worked with Kalamazoo IT, its trained staff and ability to always be on top of our requirements means that we are more than happy with the services we receive from them. Our existing relationship is one that we see continuing – their expertise and flexibility has been invaluable, particularly when we have been as busy as recently.”