Technology investment makes 24hr operations a reality for AV Dawson.

Having recently notched up its 75^th year in business, Teesside based Multimodal transport logistics specialist AV Dawson has made a significant investment to upgrade its IT infrastructure.

The £67,500 investment comes on the back of major growth in the subsea energy and automotive sectors resulting from the implementation of ambitious infrastructure development plans.

The company provides a gateway to global markets offering berthing space for vessels of up to 15,000 tonnes capacity, a road haulage fleet of over 400 trailers, an inland rail connected container base and 1 million square feet of buildings.

It became clear that robust and highly resilient IT systems were required to service the needs of a demanding customer base. Office Manager Neil McShane explained, “I think it’s reasonable to say that our legacy systems were close to breaking point with compromised backup routines and disk space at a critical level.”

“We certainly couldn’t afford to risk catastrophic system failure and the potential for extended downtime that would cause.”

AV Dawson turned to TSG for a solution that would underpin business continuity at the same time as providing in-built disaster recovery, “The specialists at TSG were already providing our IT support and so they were familiar with our set up.”

“The reporting we received through their SystemCare service made it clear that we needed to take action and their proposed solution made complete sense.”

TSG has deployed a fully virtualised solution, taking advantage of AV Dawson’s multi-site environment, as National Technical Director, Paul Burns outlines, “Compatibility issues relating to a number of existing applications dictated the need for an on-premise solution. It was clear that the business wasn’t ready for migration to the cloud.”

“By deploying two Windows 2012 Hyper-V Hosts in the Ayrton Office to provide full replication and a further host on the Wharf site we’ve put in place complete failover and high availability. This means the business can continue to operate seamlessly even if one of the sites fails.”

Managing Director Gary Dawson added: “This investment helps put AV Dawson in a position to become the go-to logistics firm for anything related to offshore support and wind energy. Our customers working within the offshore energy sector will only increase as we continue to move towards a 24-hour quayside operation.”