Dell and EMC have signed a contract worth an estimated €2m to implement a storage infrastructure over a two-year period for the ESB. The contract was secured by the two IT players following a competitive tender.
The purpose of the new infrastructure is to help ESB manage its increasing year-on-year data growth and create greater cost efficiencies. It is understood that due to the size and nature of ESB’s business, its information is growing at an annual rate of 50pc.
“ESB is aggressively creating a business model to enable it to compete effectively in a deregulated market,” explained Tony Quinn, sales manager with EMC Ireland. “In order to meet this challenge it is vital that the enterprise infrastructure to manage the organisation’s information is secure, flexible and able to cope with significant growth with a minimum of management overhead.”
Up until now, the ESB has used traditional storage methods for its storage data and this has proven to be too expensive.
The EMC storage area network solution is based on an EMC Symmetrix DMX 2000 storage platform, EMC’s SRDF replication technology and the EMC ControlCenter family of integrated storage management software.
The contract also includes the provision of automatic tape libraries to ESB by Dell for the next two years. The technology for the tape libraries is based around PC136T and SDLT technology.
The SRDF software allows ESB to have full information systems disaster tolerance by using its telecom fibre channel network and dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) to replicate data to a remote IT centre in the Greater Dublin Area.
Sean Kirwin, storage manager, ESB, said: “Our IT infrastructure is quite large and our requirements change on an ongoing basis. The EMC solution effectively addressed our present needs and has provided a solution that will continue to meet our requirements as the business evolves and grows.
“EMC’s hardware and software products are proven, stable products and are the market leaders with a large number of local and international reference sites that we could talk to. In short, as a result of selecting this solution we will be able to continue to grow, while increasing our levels of service and lowering our total cost of ownership.”
By John Kennedy
