Active Tree Services

About Active Tree Services

Founded by the Willcocks family in 1974, today, Active Tree Services is an Australian owned business with a national footprint and a workforce of 800 committed to delivering services in arboriculture, vegetation management, consultancy and systems.

The Challenge

Active Tree Services was due for an infrastructure refresh and needed something that met the growing needs of the business, including offsite replication and better enterprise storage management tools.

When Canary IT was introduced to Active Tree, they wanted a cloud-ready environment to support their future cloud strategy.

Data is one of Active Tree Service's most valuable asset. Therefore, they wanted to ensure that their data was readily available and accessible, protected in public, private or multi-cloud environments.

Active went out to the market and invited partners to respond to an RFP. Active Tree's Infrastructure Manager, Matt Grech, worked with the Canary IT team while working with a previous client. He was very happy with the level of quality and support Canary IT had provided in previous projects. As a result, he invited them and two other partners to respond to the RFP.

The Solution

Canary IT recommended a solution with a high-performing, cost-effective data centre platform to operate its national vegetation management services for the next 3-5 years. In addition, Canary IT's solution ensured that it would dovetail into Active's proposed cloud strategy framework for a multi-cloud architecture while maintaining data sovereignty for Active.

Canary IT implemented a private cloud service platform to deliver a disaster recovery and business continuity framework. The platform met Active Tree's requirement for high a level of reliability, availability, and agility. It also provides a futureproof solution, maintaining application performance across the life of the infrastructure solution.

For Active Tree's storage refresh, Canary IT implemented NetApp AFF250. This storage platform gives them the performance and reliability that Active requires. In addition, NetApp allows them to embrace a hybrid multi-cloud strategy.

Backup was delivered via ArcServe with replication to CanaryIT Back up as a Service. NetApp Snap Mirror provides their Disaster Recovery solution to Canary IT DRaaS solution.

Business Outcomes

Active Tree have experienced has noticed improvements in different parts of its business:

• Applications and data were migrated from their existing platform to their new environment with minimal interruption to day-to-day operations.
• NetApp storage has futureproofed its environment, allowing Active to continue embracing a multi-cloud strategy. They can move their data in and out of public or private clouds as required.
• Their NetApp solution ensures that their storage infrastructure can scale effortlessly, run file shares at peak performance and deliver industry-leading protection and security.
• There has been a significant uplift in performance, compliance and governance
• Offsite Back up and DR provided, exceeding both RPO and RTO targets agreed, providing N+1 local redundancy.