Hospitality

Crieff Hydro Hotel

The client

Crieff Hydro Hotel has been at the heart of Perthshire for 150 years and is now part of a family of seven hotels across Scotland. The resort sits in the beautiful Strathearn Valley – one hour from Glasgow and Edinburgh – while the hotel is set in a 900-acre estate with a Victorian spa, 9-hole par 3 golf course and over 60 indoor and outdoor activities.

The challenge

We were first introduced to the Crieff Hydro IT team through one of our datacentre partners. Crieff Hydro had approached them when looking to build an extended datacentre network to centralise services across some of the managed hotels within Scotland.

The main requirement was to bring together all the hotels’ email and data services under one network – allowing for better collaboration and shared access – while also migrating the business to a new Property Management System for all hotels.

The solution

Our initial task was to extend the Crieff Hydro Hotel network into the datacentre and migrate to a newer version of Microsoft Exchange. A new central file server was also deployed in the datacentre alongside the new Exchange and Active Directory servers.

Site-to-Site IPsec connectivity was set up between each of the hotel and datacentre networks. Each hotel’s existing server hardware was repurposed as local Active Directory domain controllers with local file and print services.

A separate datacentre network was deployed with a Microsoft Remote Desktop solution, providing access for all hotels to the new Property Management System. Deploying this network separately was a requirement for PCI compliance.

The outcome

We continue to provide support and consultation to the Crieff Hydro IT Team and have IT support contracts in place with some of their managed hotel properties.

The kind words

“Over the seven years of working with AMiTEK, we have been delighted with the professional standard of work they provide and continue to provide. The team at AMiTEK have always clearly understood our business and are always willing to lend a hand in the short notice situations that arise across any of our hotels.

Projects such as our domain expansion and the additional datacentre environment for our property management system were completed by the team at AMiTEK within tight deadlines and to a high standard. We look forward to continuing to work with AMiTEK on future projects and for ad hoc support through our business. We would highly recommend AMiTEK for any of your IT needs.”

Ryan Gourlay . Senior IT Specialist

Wild hive – Callow hall Hotel

The client

Callow Hall Hotel is the latest Wild Hive hotel renovation located in Derbyshire. The hotel boasts 15 individually designed bedrooms in the main house with two treehouse-style woodland hideaways and 11 woodland hive bedrooms within the hotel’s 35 acres of garden.

The challenge

With AMiTEK already providing IT support services to Wild Hive, they approached us during the initial planning stages of the Callow Hall Hotel renovation project.

The brief was to provide a completely new IT infrastructure design incorporating a hybrid on-premise / cloud services network for admin and business operations along with hotel systems such as PMS, IP TV, EPOS and guest WIFI.
High availability for systems and network segregation were key requirements for ensuring the hotel’s systems were secure and the customer experience positive.

The solution

With the opportunity to build a network from the ground up, our first task was to ensure locations of the central and remote comms distribution points functioned well for both the building and connected systems.

A new firewall and network switching environment was built using a multi VLAN design to ensure segregation between the admin network, hotel services and VOIP systems.

New server hardware was installed, with Microsoft Hyper-V used as the host platform. Servers for the internal Active Directory network, file & print services and the EPOS systems were then deployed as Hyper-V virtual machines.

A new Microsoft 365 Tenant was created with Microsoft Azure Active Directory Connect used to create a single sign-on experience between the on-premise systems and Microsoft 365 cloud-based services.

To finalise the setup, we worked with various third parties for PMS, EPOS and IP TV systems, assisting their teams to ensure their systems were secure and met customer needs.

The outcome

We continue to provide IT support to Callow Hall Hotel with a full IT support services contract, and are now engaging with the group regarding their next hotel project.

The kind words

“The team at Amitek have done an outstanding job, not only have they delivered the project on time and within budget. The follow up service has also been excellent, always available on the phone or by email 24/7. I can definitely recommend Amitek should you be looking at having a whole new IT system designed and installed from top to bottom.”

Ed Burrows D.L. – Managing Director

Bruhenny Hotels – Blackwell Grange Hotel

The client

The Blackwell Grange Hotel is a 4-star 17th Century mansion hotel set in 15 acres of woodland in the County Durham countryside.
The hotel offers 108 bedrooms with Spa and Leisure club facilities and is close to both Blackwell Grange and Stressholme golf courses.

The challenge

As the Blackwell Grange Hotel’s current IT service provider, we had been involved in discussions with third parties to upgrade the original local EPOS system.

The hotel’s aging server hardware meant the best solution would be to consolidate the existing two physical servers used for EPOS and the Admin network into a single virtual host server.

The new solution would provide a new server ready for the EPOS upgrade and would allow the local Admin Active Directory network to be upgraded to the latest Windows server operating system.

The solution

The first task was to build the new server hardware and deploy it as a Microsoft Hyper-V host server. A new Windows Server 2019 virtual server was then deployed and promoted as a Domain Controller on the existing Active Directory network.

All network services were migrated to the new Domain Controller including the existing Microsoft Azure Active Directory Connect service before the original Domain Controller was demoted and removed from the network.

Finally, a second Windows Server 2019 virtual server was deployed and handed over to the 3rd party support company tasked with upgrading the EPOS system.

The outcome

AMiTEK continues to provide IT support to the Blackwell Grange Hotel with a Remote IT support services contract.

The kind words

“Amitek continue to provide excellent support and maintenance for all our IT services. Since appointing Amitek in 2017 we have not looked back, they also provided great support during the COVID pandemic. I did wonder if we had made the right decision appointing a remote IT company and not a local company however we have not looked back. I would highly recommend Amitek services for all your IT services, they are always quick to respond to any support call even out of hours and at weekends they always provide a solution to any issue we might encounter. Thank you Amitek.”

Dawn Raine, General Manager – Blackwell Grange Hotel