Posts Tagged ‘virtualisation’

Don’t miss the most important virtualisation event of 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Novosco wins three-year IT hosted services contract

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Novosco

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

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

About ezetop

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in: Events Tags: virtualisation

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

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.

Posted in: Press Releases Tags: Cloud Computing, datacentre, virtualisation

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.

Posted in: Press Releases Tags: virtualisation, VMware

John Stone, CTO, Cisco; Novosco MD, Patrick McAliskey;Jimmy Kehoe, Partner Manager, VMware;Brendan Crossey, Territory Manager, EMC

Novosco, Ireland’s leading provider of virtual IT infrastructure and services, held an industry leading ‘Virtual Datacentre’ briefing in the Europa Hotel, Belfast on 11th June.   With 140 IT end users registered, the event focused on the IT industry’s first Cloud offering now becoming a reality.  Novosco held the briefing in conjunction with key technology partners VMware, EMC & Cisco. 

 The exclusive briefing featured Novosco’s new Cloud network offering and how Novosco, VMware and other technology partners can deliver a new cloud computing platform.

The benefits of IT virtualisation, such as server consolidation, cost savings and desktop/application centralisation have always been widely known, but clients are realising more and more the future operational benefits that a virtual IT infrastructure has to offer, including the move to a cloud infrastructure.  Cloud computing essentially is the delivery of applications/files, (anything from storage to email and CRM), over the internet.

“As Ireland’s leading virtualisation expert, Novosco is best placed to bring the new Cloud offering to the IT market”, said Patrick McAliskey, Managing Director, Novosco.  “Cloud computing has long been a buzz word within the IT industry, but until now its true implementation has not been possible.  With a reputation for delivering industry firsts and working alongside our technology partners, VMware, EMC and Cisco, we are set to transform the IT industry once again”.   

During the briefing, VMware released its new vSphere 4 product, which is the leading platform for building cloud infrastructures.  Novosco technical staff supplemented this with a LIVE vSphere demo.   EMC also discussed virtualised storage and Cisco presented virtualised networking. 

Registered delegates included Novosco customers such as Belfast Trust, Belfast International Airport, and Progressive Building Society.

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

Posted in: Events Tags: Citrix, virtualisation

Novosco awarded ICT Excellence Award for market-leading performance in supplying and integrating systems solutions.

Dublin, 27th May 09 - Novosco, Ireland’s leading provider of virtual IT infrastructure and services has been awarded ‘Systems Integration Company of the Year at ICT Excellence Awards, Dublin.  The awards took place on Thursday 21st May at the Royal Marine Hotel, Dun Laoghaire, where the ICT excellence award was presented to Novosco technical director, Justin Winston by Dr Tom McCarthy, CEO, IMI.

The Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Excellence awards are in their ninth year and recognise outstanding achievement in the sector.  Novosco was delighted with this award which commends market-leading performance in supplying and implementing systems solutions. Special recognition was given to Novosco who clearly demonstrated integration of diverse systems from multiple sources. 

This award was based on the integration of two projects, John Sisk & Sons & Lagan Holdings where multiple technologies where implemented including Microsoft Exchange, Citrix XenApp for remote user access, VMware for server virtualisation and Riverbed technology for accelerating application performance and data transfer.   Other technologies included EMC Celerra & VMware Site Recovery Manager for disaster recovery and Mimosa Nearpoint for email archiving. 

“We are extremely flattered to receive this award and we take great encouragement from this recognition of our unique approach to IT infrastructure.  Our clients have always told us that they want to see real solutions, not just product pitches” said Eddie O’Rourke, Sales Director of Novosco.  “By figuring out which blend of technologies is right for each client, we have achieved some great results over the past year.  Despite, or maybe even because of today’s economic challenges, it is encouraging to see so many organisations looking at new ways to increase their efficiency by using technology, particularly virtualisation technology”.
 
Novosco’s philosophy is that the answer for customers is rarely black and white. With the highest level of accreditation in Ireland for virtualised solutions and with more staff than any other provider accredited with Citrix, EMC, Microsoft and VMware technologies, Novosco has a high level of in-house expertise that allows engineers to integrate multiple technologies seamlessly. 

A customised and fully integrated solution unique to each clients IT infrastructure is designed.  This is what makes Novosco a trusted advisor for many clients such as John Sisk & Sons and Lagan Holdings. 

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.  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.

Posted in: Press Releases Tags: awards, virtualisation