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.”

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.

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.

Iain McClure, Novosco Technical Consultant & David Maginnes, Novosco Account Manager

On Thursday 2nd April, at the Ramada Hotel, Belfast, the Belfast Telegraph held their 2009 business awards.

Novosco was commended for service excellence in both pre & post sales, as well as their contribution to clients through innovative virtualisation projects.

“As a business that depends on the availability of our systems to serve our members we have achieved significant benefits through our partnership with Novosco.   With their help we have implemented Virtualisation both for our desktops and a number of key servers.  This has improved the manageability, reliability and resilience of both applications and servers significantly.  These benefits have been felt throughout the organisation.  Our users have experienced major improvements in application performance, availability and reliability.  We are much more flexible and in control of our systems.  Our centralised environment allows us to prioritise our efforts where it matters most”.
Tommy O’Neill, Head of IT, Progressive Building Society

The solution leverages several types of virtualisation to allow all of The Malton’s applications to run securely and in a well performing manner from a dedicated data centre.

The most unique aspect of the deal however, is that everything was paid for as a service. “It may surprise some people that the capital expenditure figure for this project was zero.  Not only is this attractive from a cashflow point of view, but this approach brings additional benefits, such as the fact that The Malton now has a consistent and predictable cost for IT for at least the next three years. This brings the business some comfort in uncertain times,” explains Eddie O’Rourke, Sales Director with Novosco.

“We liked this approach because it meant that everything was paid for out of operating expenditure. The idea of investing in lots of hardware which depreciates very quickly was not appealing to us. Most importantly, we have been extremely happy with the performance and support of the system since it went live,” adds Conor Hennigan, General Manager of The Malton.

The project is different from traditional hosted solutions due to the fact that the customer did not bring any hardware to the data centre. O’Rourke explains how this was possible: “By making the upfront investment in what is effectively ‘virtual IT real estate’, a bit like an ‘application hotel’, we can charge out virtual ‘plots’ as one single fee without the customer having to make that capital investment.  This virtual plot happens to live inside a dedicated data centre, making both the physical systems and the surrounding environment completely resilient.

“The additional value that Novosco brings to this scenario is our unique understanding of application delivery. In other words, we are the Irish leaders in delivering diverse applications to diverse locations. The days of private companies having to worry about such things are hopefully coming to an end,” O’Rouke concludes.

The Malton Hotel is a stunning Victorian hotel and much-loved Irish landmark. Known for its distinctive architecture, effortless service and genuine hospitality, The Malton has been a favourite hotel in Killarney for over a century and a half. Tucked away on six acres of landscaped gardens, fountains and pathways for rambling, The Malton is unique in combining wide-open space with the convenience of Killarney town.

The idea of IT virtualisation is fast gaining popularity, but it can be a hard concept to pin down. Different providers, vendors and resellers can define the term in their own way, depending on the product each offers. Essentially, however, IT virtualisation is a way of combining and pooling hardware resources to more efficiently deliver software programs or storage space.

“Virtualisation separates applications from a physical reliance on hardware,” according to Eddie O’Rourke, sales director of virtualised systems provider Novosco. “It allows the running of IT systems on less hardware, reducing energy costs and carbon footprint, and enabling a lot more flexibility and dynamism in terms of how we run systems.”

O’Rourke says technology advances mean the concept of virtualisation is now open to all sizes of business. “It has made the transition from being experimental to the mainstream. Players such as VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and EMC have come out with their own mainstream virtualisation offerings. It has become a platform where people feel comfortable.”

There are two distinct ways in which companies can virtualise their systems. They can purchase virtualised solutions and implement them within their own IT department, or they can ask a partner to take over control of their newly virtualised systems, which are then hosted and maintained off-site.

“If the customer decides to virtualise their on-site infrastructure, there is a capital acquisition cost at the beginning which is clawed back over a number of years,” says O’Rourke. “Alternatively, the provider makes that investment on their behalf, and converts the customer’s physical infrastructure into a virtual one. Then you can buy everything as a service: hardware, software and services.”

Virtualisation can also open up mobility opportunities to staff who may move from site to site or access applications or storage from the road or from home. “At the front end the user can be anywhere and get access to any system at any time,” says O’Rourke.

Before leaping into virtualisation, however, businesses should be aware that the concept is still relatively new and evolving, and it may not work for every business in every situation.

Still, O’Rourke maintains that as the technology progresses, more and more SMEs will choose to virtualise part and then all of their IT function. “Smaller businesses can virtualise one or two applications so that they are available from anywhere on the internet, for example,” he says. “Once they feel comfortable they would introduce more systems into the virtualised environment.”

The future of virtualisation is in eliminating the difference, for the user or smaller business owner, between hardware machines and software applications, according to O’Rourke. “You can now virtualise someone’s entire server room and offer each element back as a service to the business.”

The core Novosco message of Virtualisation and reducing energy consumption was very well received by the audience and press. In fact, Patrick McAliskey, our Managing Director was quoted on the radio alongside HP Group Manager, Brad Kirby who was hosting another event at the Waterfront on the same day.

Listen here

Mentioned on Belfast City Beat and Downtown.

Below are a selection photographs taken on the day.