Maxol futureproofs with Dell virtualisation


20 Feb 2008

The Irish-owned Maxol oil company has signed a deal with Dell to provide it with a tailor-made virtual environment for its data storage needs.

As Maxol’s present IT equipment approached the end of its shelf life, the company wanted to implement a new system that would incorporate power saving with greener policies that might help reduce its carbon footprint.

“With over 170 employees on 10 sites throughout the country, we were looking for a solution to manage this complex infrastructure which would allow us to communicate between all our sites and store increasing amounts of data, while taking account of limited physical capacity,” said Stephen McCormack, IT manager for Maxol.

“We were also looking for a team who could provide us with a solution to meet our future growth and business continuity needs.”

Dell’s consultation division, Dell Services, looked at Maxol’s current storage as well as its data needs and requirements and designed a system using a Microsoft Virtual Server cluster, which works on a virtualised platform.

In order to meet the requirements to reduce Maxol’s carbon footprint, Dell designed the system to transfer all operations to a single system every night when usage was at its lowest to minimise energy requirements.

“The virtual environment allows for Maxol to continue growing its data storage capacity without physically impacting on the space in the data centre,” said Kieran Fitzgerald, solutions architect with Dell.

“By futureproofing the solution, Maxol has effectively upgraded its systems so that it has optimum performance across the company nine months before it would otherwise have had. Instead, the company can very easily upgrade next year with no disruption when the upgrades become available.”

By Marie Boran