Press Releases

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.”

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.

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.

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 19^th, 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 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 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 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.

For more details on the VCE coalition please visit http://www.emc.com/campaign/global/vce/index.htm

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.

Novosco ranked 41st place in Ireland’s top 50 fastest growing technology companies

Patrick McAliskey, Novosco Managing Director & John Lennon, Novosco Business Development Director

Belfast & Dublin, 29th Oct 09 – Novosco, a leading provider of virtual and cloud IT infrastructure and services, announced today that it has been ranked in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Awards for the 10th consecutive year.  Novosco is uniquely one of only three companies to receive a ranking since the beginning of the Deloitte Technology awards in 1999. 

The Technology Fast 50, now in its 10th year in Ireland, is an awards programme honouring business growth, technological innovation and entrepreneurial spirit.  The programme ranks the 50 fastest-growing technology companies in Ireland based on percentage revenue growth over a five-year period. 
      
“It is a great achievement for Novosco to have been ranked for the last 10 years as one of Ireland’s leading Top 50 Technology Companies,” said Patrick McAliskey, Managing Director for Novosco.  “As criteria is based on percentage growth each year, it is notoriously hard to maintain your ranking in the FAST 50 technology awards.  The fact that Novosco has been recognised since the beginning is testament to our success in sustained growth, despite the challenging economic year”. 

Novosco has sustained yearly growth levels for a number of reasons.  As an innovative IT provider, Novosco continually adopts the latest technologies into its IT service portfolio.  With over 18 year’s virtualisation experience, Novosco’s implementation of virtualisation technologies have offered organisations of all sizes great cost savings and IT efficiencies.  Novosco is now taking customers to the next stage of virtualisation with the ever growing concept of cloud computing.    

To capitalise on the growth of cloud computing, Novosco in June 2009 acquired dooloop Ltd, an IT & Communications provider.  This enabled Novosco to quickly grow the business into the field of cloud networking/infrastructure.  As a result of the acquisition, the dooloop technology and Intellectual Property was rebranded as Novosco CloudStream™, with the CloudStream™ range of solutions leading the industry with Cloud networks and hosted Cloud servers / applications.

 “To maintain growth and satisfy customers you have to continually adopt business benefiting technologies.  Given today’s economic tide, Cloud Computing is proving an extremely popular option for customers”, continued Patrick McAliskey, Managing Director for Novosco.  “Using the CloudStream range of services, our customers have innovative cloud solutions at affordable prices.”

With hosting facilities in a series of Tier 3 data centres throughout Europe and UK, Novosco is fast becoming a cloud provider of choice, with CloudStream enabling Novosco to continually grow in export markets outside Ireland.

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

InterTradeIreland realises cloud IT efficiencies and productivity gains

Pictured are (l-r) Laurence Lord, Corporate Services Director, InterTradeIreland & Patrick McAliskey, Managing Director, Novosco

Belfast & Dublin, 14th Oct 09 - Novosco, leading provider of virtual and cloud IT infrastructure and services, announced today that it had been awarded a ‘cloud & managed services’ contract by InterTradeIreland (ITI), Ireland’s cross border trade and development body.

The contract was awarded to Novosco following a competitive tendering process and incorporates a hosted disaster recovery solution and resilient internet connection to the datacentre using Novosco’s CloudStream Network service.  The contract also included a managed service agreement where Novosco will pro-actively support the local IT infrastructure  at InterTradeIreland HQ’s in Newry.

InterTradeIreland has the responsibility to boost trade and business growth throughout the island of Northern Ireland and Ireland.  Through North/South economic co-operation and by encouraging better use of collective resources, InterTradeIreland creates an environment to increase the competitiveness of individual companies and the two economies in the global marketplace. 

“InterTradeIreland are looking forward to working with Novosco in exploring ways to realise efficiencies and savings within IT” said Laurence Lord, Corporate Services Director, InterTradeIreland.  “Using Novosco’s CloudStream IT services we are getting more for less and realising savings and productivity increases in the short term through utilising emerging cloud technologies.”

The Novosco CloudStream range of IT services leads the industry with Cloud networks and hosted Cloud servers / applications.  As a disaster recovery solution, InterTradeIreland will effectively rent virtual, cloud servers that reside in one of Novosco’s Tier 3  hosting facilities.  These hosted server files will hold replicated data from InterTradeIreland HQ’s so that the IT environment can be quickly recreated in the event of a disaster.

“The Novosco Cloud based servers for disaster recovery will provide InterTradeIreland with computing resources on demand and will leave the worry of IT hardware/infrastructure failures to Novosco” said John Lennon, Business Development Director, Novosco.  “Instead of ITI buying secondary traditional hardware for disaster recovery, they will simply avail of a hosted server platform using virtualisation technology, which will offer great IT efficiences and savings”. 

To ensure resilient internet connectivity to the datacentre, ITI also opted to use Novosco’s CloudStream Network service.  Unlike traditional network providers, Novosco CloudStream Net service is typically half the price of leased lines and utilises multiple telco/transit providers.  This has the unique advantage of offering ITI multiple layers of network resilience and maximum continuity of network service, without having to purchase costly leased lines.

In addition to cloud services for disaster recovery, Novosco will also assist ITI in the support of their local day-to-day, traditional IT infrastructure in Newry.  The Novosco ‘Managed Service Agreement’ will proactively monitor and support InterTradeIreland’s local hardware / software infrastructure.  Beyond this Novosco will also continually ensure the optimisation of InterTradeIreland’s IT network to keep IT systems lean and highly available.

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

 CloudStream Net saves customers 50%, whilst improving network performance

Pictured are Andrew Gregson, Novosco Creative Technical Director & Patrick McAliskey, Novosco Managing Director.

Belfast & Dublin, 30th July 09 -  Novosco announced today the release of the revolutionary CloudStream™ network solution – a unique and cost-effective network service that enables organisations to connect to the internet or multiple office locations, but at the fraction of the cost of leased lines. 

The Novosco CloudStream service has been added to the Novosco portfolio as a result of the acquisition of Dooloop Ltd, a former innovative IT & Communications provider.

“As a result of acquiring Dooloop and merging the two companies and technologies together, Novosco is delighted to launch the new CloudStream range of services”, said Patrick McAliskey, Managing Director, Novosco.  “CloudStream Net is a revolutionary communications technology and is the most cost-effective, yet feature rich network service available on the market today. CloudStream Net offers customers major cost savings and enables organisations of all sizes to benefit from a Cloud infrastructure.”  

CloudStream Net is unique in that the service typically lowers ongoing IT expenditure costs by as much as 50% when compared to the cost of a traditional leased line type service.  It allows multiple lines to be aggregated together, providing much improved upload and download bandwidth speed.  This is beneficial for customers using ‘real time’ applications such as video conferencing, CCTV or VoIP or for customers that require more bandwidth for cloud services like online backup.  

Unlike traditional network providers, Novosco CloudStream Net service utilises multiple Telco/transit providers.  This has the unique advantage of offering customers multiple layers of network resilience – a benefit not normally within reach for small to medium sized organisations.   Using multiple service partners and dual lines, CloudStream can seamlessly re-route traffic to a failover line/connection should network interruptions occur.   

CloudStream service has successfully been implemented at customer sites including McAvoy Group, Tobermore Concrete and Redhead International where CloudStream Net is connecting multiple office locations including to/from Dublin and Paris.

CloudStream has also been recently implemented at SDC Trailers, with offices locations spanning the UK.  “We replaced our MPLS network with CloudStream Net and achieved double the network performance for half the previous costs”, said Robert Patton, IT Manager, SDC Trailers.

As Ireland’s leading virtualisation expert, the new CloudStream offering compliments the network infrastructure of those clients that have already virtualised, whilst offering non-virtualised clients the ability to prepare for a future proof and affordable Cloud Computing platform. 

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

Zero Capital costs: Three year contract

John Timmins, Financial Controller, Burlington Hotel & Eddie O'Rourke, Novosco Sales Director

 Dublin, 23rd July 09 - Novosco, Ireland’s leading provider of virtual IT infrastructure and services, today announced that the Burlington Hotel, one of Dublin’s best known landmark hotels, has chosen Novosco to host their back office and email applications for the next three years.

“We have been extremely impressed with how quickly Novosco were able to get our applications up and running”, said John Clifton, General Manager of the Burlington.  “Since the system went live, we have had no complaints about the speed, security or usability.”

“This approach made a lot more sense than installing applications locally and having to worry about keeping them safe from harm”, continued John Timmins, Financial Controller at The Burlington. “As we don’t have any full time IT staff, a service like this was very attractive to us.”

Eddie O’Rourke, Novosco Sales Director was quick to outline the value of the service, “Novosco’s CloudStream application service allows customers to get up and running quickly without the need for any capital investment.  This is the case for new or existing applications.  In the case of the Burlington, this is attractive from a cash flow point of view but more importantly, they now have a consistent and predictable cost for running these applications for at least the next three years. This brings some comfort at a time when businesses everywhere are looking to reduce and manage their costs”.

O’Rourke goes on to explain how this approach is possible: “Novosco have already made the upfront investment in our fault tolerant cloud infrastructure so that our customers don’t have to.  This gives them valuable piece of mind.  Our customers’ virtualised applications and data reside inside a state of the art data centre, making both the physical systems and the surrounding environment completely resilient.  It also means that our customers have one less headache when it comes to disaster recovery, as they can securely access their applications from any location over the Internet”.

Novosco are the Irish leaders in virtualisation and application delivery and were recently recognised at the annual ICT Excellence awards as Best System Integration Company for 2009.

About Novosco

Novosco is one of Ireland’s leading providers of virtual IT infrastructure and services and is committed to assisting customers in the evaluation and optimisation of their IT systems.  With established hardware/software vendor partnerships with Citrix, EMC, Microsoft and VMware, Novosco offers the highest level of accreditation in Ireland for Virtualisation solutions. Novosco has pioneered the use of end to end virtualisation with server, desktop and application technologies to redefine the dynamic data centre.  This approach enables Novosco to develop and deliver cost-effective IT solutions that enhance client operations and enable them to get the most out of their IT infrastructure.

Novosco have provided solutions to a range of clients including government establishments and private sector organisations of all sizes including Lagan Holdings, John Sisk & Sons 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 The Burlington Hotel

A place that has inspired a thousand stories, the Burlington Hotel has held a special place in the heart of Dublin since 1972. If the walls could speak they would tell tales of gala events and sumptuous social gatherings, of great sporting legends whose passion ignited the hearts of many.

Ireland’s largest car dealer group selects Novosco to virtualise their entire server infrastructure

Eddie O'Rourke, Novosco Sales Director & Enda Martin, Group IT Manager, Windsor Motors

This new dynamic computing environment, implemented by Novosco, provides Windsor Motors with a flexible and resilient back-end infrastructure, which will allow the car industry leader to enjoy the benefits of a virtualised environment, providing ease of management, increased server utilisation, increased availability, as well as simple and effective disaster recovery. 

“While we continue to trade strongly through the economic downturn, every aspect of the business needs to look at how we can operate more efficiently”, said Enda Martin, Group IT Manager for Windsor Motors.   “By virtualising our production server environment, we were able to reduce the costs associated with IT management, power consumption and data centre space.  At the same time we were also looking for increased user performance and better utilisation of hardware.  We are very happy with the results.”

The solution enhances resilience and availability by utilising technologies such as VMware ESX HA and DRS cluster, supported by an EMC Clariion storage array.   This platform protects against single component failure or complete server failure and provides the most optimal use of server resources at the data centre.   In order to facilitate maintenance, live servers can be moved from one piece of server hardware to another using the features of VMware ESX.

 “Windsor Motors have reduced the physical server footprint of their production infrastructure from twenty to two” said Eddie O’Rourke, Sales Director, Novosco. “This has had a hugely positive impact on the total cost of ownership of their IT infrastructure and the entire swap out of Windsor’s enterprise servers was achieved within three months.  This was a strategic project, meaning that Windsor Motors’ entire server infrastructure now runs on VMware technology.”

All Windows servers with heavy workloads such as production application servers were reduced down to two physical hosts.  In future, by using live migration technology, production servers never need to go offline, so routine maintenance can be carried out during normal working hours. 

All servers have been made highly resilient using VMware’s High Availability features.  The backup solution leverages Symantec Backup Exec and esXpress to allow online replication of virtual machines to the Disaster Recovery (DR) site.  DR testing of key functionality is easily achieved by bringing up the replicated virtual server at the DR site within a non-live virtual switch.  VMware VirtualCenter also delivered the added benefit of an excellent remote management tool.

At the DR site, where the emphasis is on recovery in the event of a disaster, a single host has been configured. This DR solution was designed to provide enough storage to house virtual machine images and allow Windsor to take advantage of replication facilities, while also providing them with an environment which can be used to test and develop future services. As virtual machines were encapsulated into a small number of files, backup and recovery is streamlined and simplified.

For the purposes of Disaster Recovery, copies of the virtual machine files are required at an offsite location, where esXpress allows the replication of live virtual machines from one host to another.  This eradicates the need to maintain a live virtual machine at the DR destination, saving on licensing costs and providing a simple, effective and controllable DR model.

About Novosco

Novosco is one of Ireland’s leading providers of virtual IT infrastructure and services and is committed to assisting customers in the evaluation and optimisation of their IT systems.  With established hardware/software vendor partnerships with Citrix, EMC, Microsoft and VMware, Novosco offers the highest level of accreditation in Ireland for Virtualisation solutions. Novosco has pioneered the use of end to end virtualisation with server, desktop and application technologies to redefine the dynamic data centre.  This approach enables Novosco to develop and deliver cost-effective IT solutions that enhance client operations and enable them to get the most out of their IT infrastructure.

Novosco have provided solutions to a range of clients including government establishments and private sector organisations of all sizes including Lagan Holdings, John Sisk & Sons 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 Windsor Motors

Windsor Motors Group was established in 1968 and since then has grown to be Ireland’s largest and favourite dealer group. It is best known for its strong relationship with Nissan as it operates eight Nissan dealerships in Airside, Belgard, Bray, Cork, Deansgrange, Galway, Liffey Valley and Raheny. In addition it also operates four Chevrolet and SsangYong dealerships at Airside, Bray, Deansgrange and Galway and two Opel dealerships in Liffey Valley and Airside Motor Park. It has a turnover of €270m and 350 staff. Windsor is committed to ensuring customer retention and securing new customers by providing an excellent service every time.