Lynsey Corbett's Blog

Queen’s University Belfast appoints Novosco to build private cloud

Belfast, June 10th 2010 - Novosco, Ireland’s leading provider of virtual and cloud IT infrastructure and services, today announced it has been appointed to implement a VCE based virtualised Data Centre infrastructure into Queen’s University Belfast (QUB). This project represents the first major V-Block deployment throughout the Higher Education sector in the UK and Ireland.

Built on Cisco’s Unified Computing System, the new virtualised infrastructure will facilitate significantly greater numbers of virtual machines on the same piece of hardware. Cisco UCS offers centralised management over the compute, networking and storage elements needed to deploy virtual ICT infrastructures. This “wire once, walk away” approach will help address the power management targets within the University’s data centres.

The flexibility of the VCE approach within QUB will also afford management greater control over the support and management of the environment, with the potential for new and improved innovations delivered to an increasingly sophisticated end user base. Future investments in the platform will also be significantly less than additions to physical environments, all of which future proofs QUB’s investment. Novosco’s DataCentre Architecture Solutions’ Practice is underpinned by the VCE “DataCentre 3.0” vision. This approach, allied with EMC storage, Cisco’s UCS and VMware’s VSphere Could Operating System allows QUB the potential to optimise DataCentre resources with increased flexibility compared to traditional hardware based solutions.

Queen’s University is recognised as one of the best universities in the United Kingdom and Ireland. It is the UK’s Entrepreneurial University of the Year, and a member of the Russell Group of the UK’s 20 leading research-intensive universities, which includes Oxford and Cambridge.

Founded in 1845, Queen’s University Belfast has been providing higher education to students from around the world for over 165 years. Currently it caters for more than 17,000 students and 3,500 staff, with some 100,000 alumni graduates worldwide.

Jim Cunningham, Assistant Director for Information Systems said, “Novosco’s experience in delivering enterprise scale virtualisation environments, along with their strong relationships with each of the VCE technology partners, made them an easy choice to deliver V-Block into the University’s Data Centres.”

John Lennon, Sales Director for Novosco said, “QUB’s approach to the next generation data centre is instrumental in helping it remain one of the most innovative Higher Education providers in Ireland. Giving staff and students a better ICT experience within existing financial and resourcing commitments will ensure that this competitive edge is maintained”.

About Novosco

Novosco is one of Ireland’s leading providers of virtual & cloud IT infrastructure and network services. With established hardware/software vendor partnerships with Cisco, Citrix, EMC, Microsoft and VMware, Novosco offers the highest level of accreditation in Ireland for Virtualisation solutions. The Novosco CloudStream™ range of solutions is leading the industry with Cloud networks and hosted Cloud servers / applications.    

Novosco has provided solutions to a range of clients including government establishments and private sector organisations of all sizes, such as the Queen’s University Belfast, Burlington Hotel, SIAC Construction, Windsor Motors and many more.

Novosco was recently recognised at the annual ICT Excellence awards as ‘Best System Integration Company, for 2009.

For more information visit www.novosco.com

About Queen’s University Belfast

Queen’s University is recognised as one of the best universities in the United Kingdom and Ireland. It is the UK’s Entrepreneurial University of the Year, and a member of the Russell Group of the UK’s 20 leading research-intensive universities, which includes Oxford and Cambridge.

Founded in 1845, Queen’s University Belfast has been providing higher education to students from around the world for over 165 years. Currently it caters for more than 17,000 students and 3,500 staff, with some 100,000 graduates worldwide. This is reflected in the University’s Mission Statement:

“Queen’s is a broadly-based, research-driven university with a dynamic world-class research and education portfolio and strong international connections. The University promotes the widest possible access to this portfolio of excellence in an environment of equality, tolerance and mutual respect, and it fully embraces its leadership role in Northern Ireland and beyond.”

Posted in: News, Press Releases Tags: business, business continuity, Centralised Management, Cisco, Citrix, Cloud Computing, EMC, Networking, Novosco, press, security, storage, Unified Computing System, Virtual Computing Coalition, virtualisation, VMware

Novosco implements first Public Sector V-Block in the UK and Ireland

Left to right: Paul Duffy, Co-Director for ICT & Telecommunications, Belfast Health and Social Care Trust, Patrick McAliskey, Managing Director, (Novosco),

 

 Belfast, May 20th, 2010 - Novosco, Ireland’s leading provider of virtual and cloud IT infrastructure and services, today announced it has been appointed to implement private cloud computing throughout Belfast Health and Social Care Trust. This project represents the first Public Sector deployment of V-Block in the UK and Ireland, containing elements from the VCE coalition, using technologies from VMware, Cisco and EMC.

Built on Cisco’s Unified Computing System, the new private cloud based virtualised infrastructure will facilitate significantly greater numbers of virtual machines on the same piece of hardware. Cisco UCS offers centralised management over the compute, networking and storage elements needed to deploy virtual ICT infrastructures. This “wire once, walk away” approach will result in potentially speedier deployment times for healthcare delivery services.

The flexibility of private cloud computing within BHSCT will also afford management with greater control over the support and control of the environment, with the potential for new and improved services delivered within existing resource commitments and budgets. Future investments in the platform will also be significantly less than additions to physical environments, all of which future proofs BHSCT’s investment, whilst improving the patient experience. Novosco’s DataCentre Architecture Solutions’ Practice is underpinned by the VCE “DataCentre 3.0” vision. This approach, allied with EMC storage, Cisco’s UCS and VMware’s VSphere Could Operating System allows the Trust the potential to optimise DataCentre resources with increased flexibility compared to traditional hardware based solutions.

The Belfast Health and Social Care Trust (BHSCT) was formed in April 2007, by the merger of the previous six legacy healthcare trusts, within the greater Belfast area: Belfast City Hospital, Royal Group of Hospitals, Mater Infirmorium Hospital, South and East Belfast Trust, North and West Belfast Health & Social Services Trust, and Greenpark Healthcare Trust.  The resultant BHSCT provides services to over 340,000 patients and clients.

BHSCT employs over 22,000 staff, 1 in 30 of the working population in N Ireland, and with an annual revenue budget of £1.2bn, consuming over 12% of the total assembly budget, makes it the largest healthcare Trust in the UK.

Paul Duffy, Co-Director for ICT & Telecommunications said, “Novosco’s experience in virtualising large scale enterprise environments, along with their strong relationships with each of the VCE partners made this offering very compelling. We look forward to deploying the new virtualised infrastructure quickly to improve the ICT experience of our patients and staff alike.”

Patrick McAliskey, Novosco Managing Director said “BHSCT’s willingness to embrace this new way of delivering ICT services to staff and patients will undoubtedly benefit all within the Trust. We recognise the need to provide improved service to an increasingly sophisticated and ICT-reliant end user base, in the framework of constantly constrained budgets and resource commitments. BHSCT is setting the benchmark for ICT delivery, against which other public sector organisations will be measured in the coming years”.

About Novosco
Novosco is one of Ireland’s leading providers of virtual & cloud IT infrastructure and network services.  With established hardware/software vendor partnerships with Cisco, Citrix, EMC, Microsoft and VMware, Novosco offers the highest level of accreditation in Ireland for Virtualisation solutions. The Novosco CloudStream™ range of solutions is leading the industry with Cloud networks and hosted Cloud servers / applications.    

Novosco has provided solutions to a range of clients including government establishments and private sector organisations of all sizes, such as the Queen’s University Belfast, Burlington Hotel, SIAC Construction, Windsor Motors and many more.   

Novosco was recently recognised at the annual ICT Excellence awards as ‘Best System Integration Company, for 2009.

For more information visit www.novosco.com

About Belfast Health and Social Care Trust

From 1 April 2007, the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust assumes responsibility for services provided by Belfast City Hospital, The Royal Hospitals, The Mater Hospital, Greenpark Healthcare Trust, North and West Belfast and South and East Belfast HSS Trusts.

The six Trusts which join to form the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust each have a successful and distinguished history and come together to provide an integrated and comprehensive range of health and social care for the people of Northern Ireland and beyond.

The new Trust has three key targets:
• to provide safe and modernised services
• to meet Government targets on access to treatment and care
• to balance the books

The Belfast Health and Social Care Trust employs nearly 22,000 staff (one in 30 of the total NI workforce), providing services for more than 340,000 people in Belfast and regional services to the whole of Northern Ireland.

Posted in: News, Press Releases, Uncategorized

Company’s UCS accreditation and all Ireland approach, instrumental in winning industry accolade.

Left to right: Bernadette Wightman, Managing Director, Channels (Cisco UK and Ireland), Patrick McAliskey, Managing Director, (Novosco),
Kim Majerus, Director, General Manager – (Ireland Cisco UK & Ireland).

Belfast, April 19th, 2010 - Novosco, Ireland’s leading provider of virtual and cloud IT infrastructure and services, today announced it has been awarded Cisco Ireland’s UCS Data Centre Partner of the Year for 2010. Novosco won the award against stiff competition from other companies in the data centre arena.

In addition, Novosco is the first, and currently only, Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) technical solutions and sales accredited partner in Ireland.

The main factors contributing to both successes have been primarily the company’s focus on the provision of V-Block service offerings to its customer base, and secondly delivering these solutions throughout the whole of Ireland.

Novosco has been awarded a number of high profile UCS contracts in recent months. These include the delivery of the first public sector UCS environment in the UK and the current largest public sector UCS deployment in Europe.

Novosco’s DataCentre Architect Solutions’ Practice is underpinned by the “DataCentre 3.0” vision extolled by each of the key technology partners of the VCE coalition. This approach, coupled with our experience of the Cisco UCS platform, EMC’s storage offerings and VMware’s Cloud Operating System allows Novosco’s customers to experience innovative, flexible and dynamic IT environments at competitive price points.

Patrick McAliskey, Novosco Managing Director said “Our investment in Cisco and the other VCE partners’ technologies allows Novosco to be innovative in solution design. This coupled with understanding the issues facing our customer base, has allowed us to deliver the flexible and dynamic IT experience expected by all our customers. Cisco UCS gives us a real chance to get ahead of the competition in this rapidly changing market, and translate these benefits to our customers. Doing more with less gives both us and our customers an edge in the current economic climate.”

Owen McAllister, Channel Partner Manager for Cisco Ireland, said “Novosco has demonstrated a willingness to challenge the traditional method of server based computing. Their adoption of the UCS platform as well as their knowledge of cloud based computing and their strong customer relationships throughout Ireland makes them the obvious choice for this award in 2010.”

About Novosco
Novosco is one of Ireland’s leading providers of virtual & cloud IT infrastructure and network services.  With established hardware/software vendor partnerships with Cisco, Citrix, EMC, Microsoft and VMware, Novosco offers the highest level of accreditation in Ireland for Virtualisation solutions. The Novosco CloudStream™ range of solutions is leading the industry with Cloud networks and hosted Cloud servers / applications.    

Novosco has provided solutions to a range of clients including government establishments and private sector organisations of all sizes, such as the Queen’s University Belfast, Burlington Hotel, SIAC Construction, Windsor Motors and many more.   

Novosco was recognised at the annual ICT Excellence awards as ‘Best System Integration Company, for 2009.

For more information visit www.novosco.com

About Cisco Systems

Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO), is the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet. Information on Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, please go to http://newsroom.cisco.com.

Cisco, Cisco Systems, and the Cisco Systems logo are registered trademarks of Cisco Systems, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and certain other countries. All other trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. This document is Cisco Public Information.

About VCE Alliance

The Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition, formed jointly by EMC and Cisco with VMware, represents an unprecedented level of collaboration in development, services, and partner enablement to minimize risk during an organization’s infrastructure virtualization journey to private cloud implementation.

Vblock Infrastructure Packages are integrated IT offerings from the VCE coalition that combine best-in-class virtualization, networking, compute, storage, security, and management technologies with end-to-end vendor accountability. Pre-integrated to provide a new way of delivering IT to businesses, these offerings are validated to help enable the creation of customized solution packages.

Vblock Unified Customer Engagement includes capabilities to help customers understand the business benefits of VCE and deploy Vblock Infrastructure Packages to minimize risk in the journey to private cloud.

Unifying customer engagements, the VCE coalition offers comprehensive professional and technical support services to provide a smooth end-to-end customer and partner experience.

The VCE coalition professional services, jointly developed and delivered, will help customers understand how to maximize value and speed time to virtualization and private cloud solutions. These offers include executive and architecture advisory services, strategy services, and design and implementation services.

Posted in: News, Press Releases Tags: awards, business continuity, Cisco, Cloud Computing, EMC, Novosco, press, virtualisation, VMware

Join us at this exclusive half day workshop to find out how we can help you to address the daily challenges facing IT managers  such as;

• Increasing numbers of users, application and productivity requirements.
• Increasing expectation from end users on quality of service.
• Continuous performance and stability issues.
• Complex patch management issues.
• Heightened security risks and compliancy concerns.
• Increasing costs for support and maintenance.
• Rapidly changing form factor and connectivity options

Agenda

09:00-09:30   Breakfast  & Introduction 

09:30- 10:00  Session 1 

•  Using VMware View 4 to meet the top desktop management challenges, whilst also reducing costs.
• Learn how to simplify your migration to Windows 7 through application and desktop virtualisation.
•  Q&A’s

10.00-10:15  Tea/Coffee break

10:15-10:45  Session 2                      

• Using VMware tools for virtual Infrastructure management.
• Investigate the availabilty of 3rd party tools to help manage Virtual Infrastructure.
• Reflections of our real life deployment in the field.
• Q&A’s

10:45-11.15  Session 3

•  Virtualisation in BHSCT
• The Business Challenges ‘Do more with less’
•  Why Virtualise?
• Future Plans & Developments(Next Generation Datacentres/ Building the BHSCT Private Cloud)                 
•  Q&A’s

11:15-12:00  Session 4 

• Overview of Cisco UCS
• Live BHSCT Demo               
• Q&A’s

12:00-12:30  Session 5                  

• Virtual Infrastructure Backup 
•  The challenges and methodologies of how to restore  
• How various backup products fit business requirements.                 

12:30-13:00 Buffet Lunch & Conclusion

Posted in: Events, Uncategorized Tags: business continuity, Cisco, Cloud Computing, datacentre, EMC, hosting, virtualisation, VMware

Join Novosco for an exclusive Private Cloud Briefing

Agenda

• Introductions and Novosco Overview

• Overview of VCE/VBlock

• Overview of conventional Server Design for VMware implementations

• Challenges when Scaling Out VMware Infrastructure

• Demonstration of Unified Management Console

• Tour of the data centre and UCS infrastructure
  Discussion / Whiteboard

Who should attend?

CIO’s looking to build their own private cloud infrastructure

or extend into the cloud

Posted in: Events Tags: Citrix, Cloud Computing, EMC, Novosco, virtualisation, VMware

Don’t miss the most important virtualisation event of 2010

Novosco and VMware would like to invite you to join us at the Vitualisation Forum 2010.

Whether you are just starting your virtualisation program or have an advanced deployment, this event will show how you can maximise the benefits of virtualisation to your organisation for:

• Desktop Virtualisation
• Application Virtualisation
• Security
• Remote Office Management
• Reduced capital and operational costs
• Business continuity and disaster recovery
• Cloud computing

This free one day event is packed with educational tracks, customer presentations, live demos and networking opportunities. With over 20 virtualisation product and service providers participating you will receive a broad view of how the virtualisation industry can benefit your organisation.

The VMware genius bar will give you access to key VMware staff to discuss how to drive your virtualisation program forward and how the recent major enhancements to infrastructure, desktop management solutions can benefit you.

Find out how more than 150,000 companies are saving up to 50 percent in data center and other IT costs with virtualisation. Understand why over 60 percent of VMware customers rely on virtualisation for their disaster recovery. Leave with the information and resources you need to move forward with your own virtualisation strategy.

Posted in: Events, Novosco, Uncategorized, Workshops, business Tags: Cloud Computing, datacentre, Novosco, virtualisation, VMware

Novosco wins three-year IT hosted services contract

Pictured from left:Mike Tesar, Chief Technical Officer, ezetop with Eddie O'Rourke, Sales Director, Novosco and David Shackleton, Chief Operating Officer, ezetop

Dublin, 6th Oct, 2009 — Novosco, Ireland’s leading provider of virtual and cloud IT infrastructure and services, today announced that ezetop, the Irish-headquartered international mobile top-up group, have chosen them to host their key line of business applications.  The hosted applications service will provide ezetop with dramatically improved levels of application availability and resilience. ezetop enables people living or working abroad to instantly top-up mobile phones of family and friends back home. Services are available from retail stores across North America, Europe and the Middle East region as well as from a significant online website, www.ezetop.com.

Providing the service for over 80 mobile operators , ezetop services are available online via the ezetop e-commerce website or at over 80,000 retail stores that rely on ezetop’s large global network.   Due to the critical and real-time nature of ezetop’s e-commerce business, ezetop required a highly available application system which would also allow it to grow globally, without infrastructure constraints.

To deploy a new virtual infrastructure to support ezetop’s platform, Novosco was the chosen provider to first host their critical ‘business to consumer’ (B2C) applications, in particular their key e-commerce website applications supporting hundreds of thousands of consumers across the globe.  In addition, Novosco were also selected to host and fully manage ezetop’s internal user applications, which include various Microsoft tools.

David Shackleton, Chief Operating Officer at ezetop said, “The performance and stability of our online platform is of paramount importance. Novosco demonstrated their understanding of our commercial and technical requirements and came up with a robust solution, to cost effectively meet our requirements as well as most importantly, being able to scale to meet our future growth”.

Eddie O’Rourke, Novosco Sales Director for Ireland said,  “Instead of ezetop buying traditional infrastructure to support the internal company services, which were not core to their service offering, they availed of Novosco’s existing cloud platform which allowed greater operational and financial benefits”.

Mike Tesar, Chief Technical Officer with ezetop was impressed with Novosco’s integration skills: “What was important to us was having our applications tailored to work the way we need to use them.  This meant that Novosco had to understand our requirements in detail.  The transition was made easier by the fact that Novosco had such strong experience in systems integration, meaning that they could help with all aspects of the changes.”

About Novosco

Novosco is one of Ireland’s leading providers of virtual & cloud based IT infrastructure and network services.  With established hardware/software vendor partnerships with Citrix, EMC, Microsoft and VMware, Novosco offers the highest level of accreditation in Ireland for Virtualisation solutions.  The Novosco CloudStream™ range of solutions is leading the industry with Cloud networks and hosted Cloud servers / applications.

Novosco was recently recognised at the annual ICT Excellence awards as ‘Best System Integration Company, for 2009. For more information visit www.novosco.com.

About ezetop

ezetop enables people living or working abroad to instantly top-up mobile phones of family and friends back home. Services are available from over 80,000 retail stores across North America, Europe and the Middle East region as well as from a significant online website, www.ezetop.com.

ezetop’s services benefit mobile operators as they generate additional revenue outside their domestic market.  ezetop currently offers services in over 80 mobile operators/countries across Asia Pacific, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America and Eastern Europe and is adding operators on a regular basis.  Existing operators include Airtel, Claro, C&W, Dialog Telecom, Digicel, Globe Telecom, MTN, Orascom, Singtel, Telefonica, Telenor, Tigo, Ufone, Vodafone, Warid and others.

ezetop’s global headquarters is in Dublin, Ireland with regional headquarters in Miami, USA and Dubai, UAE.

Posted in: Press Releases Tags: Citrix, Cloud Computing, EMC, Microsoft, virtualisation, VMware