VINCI PLC (www.vinci.plc.uk) is a subsidiary of VINCI, the world’s leading concessions and construction group. A number of specialist subsidiaries operating throughout the UK enable VINCI PLC to offer a comprehensive construction package from inception, through ground investigation and remediation, to completion of the project and beyond to the maintenance of the facility. VINCI PLC has a projected annual turnover of £1.4 billion.
VINCI PLC has 30 regional offices and 100 project sites across the UK running CIFS, MAPI Exchange 2003 and HTTP, using Nortel switches and Cisco routers. They have two data centers based in Watford; one is the production site and the other a data recovery (DR) site.
VINCI PLC is now conducting a trial of Riverbed Steelhead Mobile software to accelerate applications for mobile users. Of particular interest are project sites where DSL is not available, so 3G or satellite access is used instead. The company is also investigating using Steelhead Mobile software to enable home working. In the past this was not possible as access via the VPN was not always available. VINCI PLC is also considering the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) in order to run print servers, DNS, and IPAM functionality on the Steelhead appliances in a protected zone. This would enable VINCI to consolidate IT infrastructure even further at their branch offices.
We were looking to introduce a number of new projects at the same time. Our current backup and disaster recovery strategy had to be improved if we were to reduce the data recovery window, a central IT strategy was crucial in order to control costs, and we wanted to improve speed of application access for our users.
Ben Paddick, Technical Design Architect
VINCI PLC