Royal Horticultural Society IT blooms with iomart Hosting

iomart Hosting has helped the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), the world’s largest gardening charity, to create a secure, resilient and scalable IT infrastructure to meet the online demands of its growing global membership and its staff.

RHS turned to iomart Hosting, part of AIM-listed iomart Group plc, after deciding its historic central London headquarters, the Royal Horticultural Halls in Vincent Square, Westminster, were no longer suitable to act as the charity’s data centre.

Robert Reilly, Head of IT for the Royal Horticultural Society, says, “We are a registered charity and rely on subscriptions, donations and sponsorship to fund our work, so how we deliver value back is hugely important. It was no longer economical for us to be using Vincent Square for our server hosting so we needed a new and efficient way of operating and managing our IT. iomart Hosting offered the world class, resilient, Enterprise data centre facilities that we needed at a price we could afford.”

iomart Hosting used its expertise in providing highly available, high performance VMware solutions and its Enterprise infrastructure to build a hybrid cloud platform for RHS in its secure London data centre.

The 200 year old RHS has over 400,000 members and is responsible for a series of world-class horticultural shows including the Chelsea Flower Show which celebrates its centenary this week. Its Patron Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will visit the Show today before it opens to the public.
The main RHS website which provides gardening advice, horticultural research and tickets to RHS events is supported by iomart’s Cloudsure platform which allows capacity to be scaled easily and quickly in the event of spikes in traffic. The RHS’s internal systems sit on a large secure, private cloud.

Robert Reilly continues, “There were three specific things we needed to achieve with the move to iomart’ s data centre – UPS, connectivity and a high level of security. We now have a super-fast network that connects all our outlying offices with our headquarters, allows members quick access to our vast archive of horticultural information and images, protects their personal details and keeps us online 24 hours a day.”

Sarah Haran, managing director of iomart hosting, said: “Our technical teams work with organisations to ensure that they have the bespoke mission-critical infrastructure that best supports their needs. We are proud to be helping the RHS deliver a high value hosting platform to its members and supporters.”

iomart Hosting provides cloud and managed hosting to a number of charities and not for profit organisations including the Ramblers Association and Joseph Rowntree Foundation.