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Teesside transport company in £67k IT investment following subsea energy growth

A Teesside multimodal transport logistics company has made a significant investment in its IT infrastructure to support moves towards a 24-hour quayside operation and further growth in offshore and energy support.

AV Dawson, which recently celebrated 75 years in business, has invested £67.5k to upgrade its technology on the back of major growth in the subsea energy and automotive sectors.

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 one million square feet of buildings.

As part of ambitious infrastructure development plans and a need for robust and highly resilient IT systems, the company turned to Technology Services Group (TSG) for a solution to underpin business continuity and provide in-built disaster recovery.

TSG is a national IT solutions company based in Newcastle with 450 employees operating from 12 offices across the UK.

AV Dawson office manager Neil McShane said: “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.

“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.”

The company deployed a fully virtualised solution, taking advantage of AV Dawson’s multi-site operation.

TSG’s experts deployed two Windows 2012 Hyper-V Hosts at the company’s Ayrton railhead to provide full replication and a further host at its Dawson’s Wharf site.

TSG’s national technical director, Paul Burns, said: “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.

“We’ve put in place complete failover and high availability ensuring that the business can continue to operate seamlessly even if one of the sites fails.”

Managing director of AV Dawson, Gary Dawson, said: “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.”