Case Study: British Transport Police achieves rapid disaster recovery and £7.5M TCO savings with Virtustream private cloud

British Transport Police - Customer Case Study

British Transport Police (BTP), the national rail police force with over 4,000 staff and 150+ remote offices, faced a major disaster‑recovery challenge ahead of the 2012 London Olympics. Operating from a single Camden data center with tape backups that could take days or weeks to restore, BTP needed a high‑availability, government‑owned backup datacenter but found a full hardware replica cost‑prohibitive given its 200+ servers and 3,500+ desktops.

Virtustream completed a cloud and virtualization assessment and designed a private cloud and VDI solution across the primary and new backup data centers using HP servers, VMware ESX and Dell Compellent storage. Rolled out in phases (server virtualization, phased desktop migration, failover testing), the project consolidated infrastructure onto fewer than 20 hosts, drove an expected £7.5M TCO reduction over five years, enabled recovery within four hours with less than 24 hours’ data loss, and delivered faster provisioning, higher availability and improved operational control.

British Transport Police