Posts Tagged ‘Novosco’

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

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 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 will be holding a ‘Cloud Computing Breakfast Briefing’ in the Park Inn, Belfast on Thursday 22nd Oct 09.

Agenda 

- Breakfast 
- What is Cloud Computing?
- Overview of Novosco CloudStream services
- CloudStream Net Service (Private & Resilient Cloud Network Service)
- Q&A

Who should attend: 

 Consultants, IT Professionals & management involved in networks / IT infrastructure

Spaces are limited.  To register please complete the form below:

Posted in: Events Tags: Cloud Computing, datacentre, Novosco

Novosco are Gold Sponsors at VMware Virtualisation Forum

Why Attend?

Novosco will exhibit to illustrate virtualisation benefits as well as demonstrate the innovative ‘Site Recovery Manager’ software.  Jim Fennell, Information Systems Manager, Lagan Group will also be speaking at the Forum on their implementation of  Site Recovery Manager by Novosco – the first implementation in Ireland.

Who Should Attend

All IT Professionals & Business Decision Makers

Due to demand registration for this event is now closed.

For further information visit http://www.vmware.com/go/vforum_dublin.

If you have any questions on the event please email edwina.nugent@novosco.com or telephone +44(0)2890 817171 / +353 (0) 1 245 5114

Posted in: Events Tags: Novosco, VMware

Left to right: Simon Hamilton - Technical Director, John Lennon - Sales Director, David Mulligan - Solution Architect

Novosco ranked 43^rd place in Ireland’s top 50 fastest growing technology companies

Belfast & Dublin,  29th October  2008 — Novosco, a leading provider of virtual infrastructure announced today that it has once again been awarded a ranking in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Awards, Ireland.  Ranked for the ninth consecutive year, Novosco is uniquely also one of only three companies to additionally receive a prestigious Fast 50 ‘Gold Standard Award’.

The Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Awards recognise and rank the fastest-growing technology companies in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.  Now in its ninth year, the programme allows innovative technology companies to demonstrate and receive recognition for growth strategies and successes.  This year, the Fast 50 ‘Gold Standard Awards’ have also been introduced to recognise companies that have successfully been ranked for seven or more years.

“Novosco is delighted to be ranked for the ninth time in the Deloitte Top 50 Technology Awards and is one of only three companies to achieve a ranking every year of the awards,” said Patrick McAliskey, Managing Director for Novosco.  “Through the use of innovative technology and strong vendor partnerships, Novosco is leading the industry in the concept of ‘infrastructure virtualisation’ and is positioned to transform the IT world for clients throughout the UK & Ireland”.

IT virtualisation is the act of isolating or unbinding one computing resource from others – from the data centre to the desktop.  It essentially lets one computer do the job of multiple computers, by sharing the resources of a single computer across multiple environments.  It offers organisations of all sizes great cost savings and efficiencies in reducing their carbon footprint.  With over 18 year’s virtualisation experience, Novosco has successfully assisted customers in implementing various aspects of virtualisation; from Server virtualisation right through to running virtual applications and desktops. The Awards which took place in the Guinness Storehouse, Dublin are based on percentage turnover over the past 5 years.  Novosco’s ranking is testament to the fact that turnover has grown substantially, with a customer acquisition growth rate of over 110% within both private and public sectors.

With the demand for Virtualisation technology forecasted to grow at a phenomenal rate, Novosco’s position as Ireland’s leading virtualisation expert is set to continue to go from strength to strength.

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 of all potential solutions, including the optimisation of current IT systems.  With established hardware/software vendor partnerships including Citrix, EMC, Microsoft and VMware, Novosco offers the highest level of accreditation in Ireland for Virtualisation solutions.  This approach enables Novosco to develop and deliver cost-effective solutions that are an asset to client’s businesses.  Novosco have provided solutions to a range of clients including government establishments and private sector organisations of all sizes.

For more information visit www.novosco.com

For more information on the final Technology Fast 50 ranking list visit www.fast50.ie.

Posted in: Press Releases Tags: awards, business, Novosco

Over 300 CIB users across the country realise the benefit of email migration project.

Citizens Information Board (CIB) has chosen Novosco to centralise email operations and facilitate migration for over 300 users in offices across the country using Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.

Novosco’s solution allows CIB to have an online central view of all CIB and Citizens Information Centres (CIC) email countrywide for the first time, facilitating central backup of all data and greater collaboration possibilities for all users in offices across Ireland.

A web-based system was implemented by Novosco to make the solution accessible to all the CIB’s offices and the national network of CICs. CIB currently has 15 offices throughout the country, including the Head Office in Dublin, five regional offices and nine branch offices. The Board provides the Citizens Information website (www.citizensinformation.ie) and supports the voluntary network of Citizens Information Services (106 Citizens Information Centres nationwide) and the Citizens Information Phone Service (Lo-Call 1890777121).

“The new solution means that email downtime is substantially minimised” says Eddie O’Rourke, sales director with Novosco. “It has also introduced additional functionality such as central calendaring and collaboration.”

The CIB (formerly known as Comhairle) has a broad range of functions, which are set out in the Comhairle Act, 2000. A function of the CIB is to support the provision of information, advice and advocacy services to ensure that individuals have access to accurate, comprehensive and clear information relating to social services and are referred to the relevant services.

“Email is an every day part of The Citizens Information Board and CIC life, supporting communication and data management, responding to customer queries and disseminating information,” says Sinead Forde, ICT Manager at CIB. “We chose Novosco for this strategic project because of their skills in Microsoft Exchange together with their relevant experience with networks of a similar size and shape.”

Exchange Server 2007 was chosen as the technology platform, as it provided the most flexibility in terms of the diverse client requirements as well as the reliability to ensure that access was provided 24×7.

The new application acts as a contact database for CICs, CIB, its suppliers and contacts, also allowing email capability – including send/receive, calendar and task capability-, groups management and group calendars; data management; email archive, backup and restore capability, and also instant messaging and collaboration tools.

The second major factor in making this solution an exceptional experience was continuous replication (CCR) only available with Exchange Server 2007. The CIB wished to move to a more robust e-mail platform, providing cost-effective, centrally managed e-mail and messaging facilities with low administrative overheads, based on proven technologies.

“Changes in the nature of CIB’s email and collaboration requirements were not being met by the existing system,” adds O’Rourke. “The new system is extensible and scalable which means it doesn’t just meet CIB’s current needs but it will also be able to support additional activities and functions that CIB may undertake in the future.”

Posted in: Press Releases Tags: Microsoft, Novosco

More evidence of virtualisation gaining traction in Irish business circles in Enterprise Ireland’s eBusiness Live circular…

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.”

Posted in: News Tags: Novosco

Dublin, Ireland, dateline…SIAC, one of Ireland’s major construction groups, has chosen Novosco to design, implement and support its new virtualised and mission-critical infrastructure catering for the industry’s ever-changing IT requirements.

This dynamic computing environment, implemented by Novosco, will provide SIAC with a flexible and resilient backed infrastructure and will allow the construction leader to enjoy the benefits of a virtualised environment, including ease of management, increased server utilisation, increased availability and recoverability, as well as simple and effective disaster recovery.

“From the outside, the construction industry looks very traditional, however it is in fact large scale engineering at its most agile,” says Eamonn Buckley, group IS & T manager for SIAC Construction Ltd.

“Construction sites are in effect once-off factories with portacabins sometimes housing up to 50 staff with desktops. SIAC, one of Ireland’s largest construction companies, has over 500 IT users at locations ranging from a site office in Inishmean to a steel plant in Brighton.”

The solution enhances resilience and availability at SIAC’s primary site by utilising an ESX HA and DRS cluster which is back ended with a fiber-attached EMC storage array. This platform protects against single component failure and server failure and in addition provides for the most optimal use of server resources at the primary site.

Using the features of VMware VI3, live servers can be moved from one piece of server hardware to another to facilitate maintenance as well as to make maximum use of server resources.

Eddie O’Rourke, Sales Director with Novosco, was quick to point out the benefits of the project, “SIAC have managed to reduce the physical server footprint of their production infrastructure from 30 down to 3.  This has a dramatic and positive impact on the total cost of ownership of their IT infrastructure as a whole.”

“The entire swap out of SIAC’s enterprise Windows servers was achieved within six months, including Exchange and Active Directory upgrades, with a business impact of less than two hours.  In addition, by using live migration technology, production servers never need to go offline, so routine maintenance can be carried out during normal working hours.  This was a strategic project, meaning that the majority of SIAC’s server infrastructure now runs on VMware, including mission critical systems such as ERP and email messaging.  We hope to see the solution pay for itself within nine months”

All servers are now resilient using VMware’s High availability features. VizionCore delivered the back-up solution and the two-hourly replication solution to the DR site.  DR testing of key functionality such as Exchange is easily achieved by bringing up the replicated Exchange server on the DR site within a non-live virtual switch.  VMware VirtualCenter also delivered the added benefit of an excellent remote management tool for SIAC servers.

At the DR site, where the emphasis is on recovery in the event of a disaster, a single ESX host with another EMC CX SAN is implemented. This DR implementation was designed to provide enough storage to house Virtual machine images and allow SIAC to take advantage of replication facilities while also providing SIAC with an environment that can be used to test and develop for future services. As virtual machines were encapsulated into a small number of files, backup and recovery was simplified.

For the purposes of Disaster Recovery, copies of the virtual machine files are required at an offsite location. esxReplicator allows the replication of live virtual machines from one ESX Host to another without the need to maintain a live virtual machine on the destination saving on licensing costs and providing a simple, effective and controllable DR model.

About SIAC

Founded in 1913, SIAC is one of Ireland’s largest contractors and have built a strong reputation and growing business in Ireland and the UK.

Posted in: Press Releases Tags: Novosco