Thursday 25 February 2010

North East IT Experts Help National Park Make Dramatic Energy Savings

Management at the Lake District National Park – England’s largest National Park - have turned to a North East IT specialist for help in boosting efficiency and reducing their environmental impact by the equivalent of planting 600 trees.

Experts from Gateshead-based ITPS have spent several months helping LDNP’s ICT Service to implement virtualisation technology, consolidating the power of what was formerly 30 computer servers into just six machines.

With their help, LDNP has become the first within the 14-strong National Parks network to have fully virtualised its server estate.

Virtualisation technology allows the work of several servers to be carried out by one. The result is a better return on IT investment, stronger business continuity, a lower carbon footprint and cheaper running costs – typically by up to at least a third.

ITPS appointed a dedicated project manager to handle the contract, which comes following a long-standing partnership between the two organisations. ITPS manages LDNP’s maintenance and support requirements and is also regularly called in to assist with other consultancy and implementation projects.

Martin Lord, LDNP’s Head of ICT, said: “We protect and preserve some of the most spectacular landscapes in the UK, so lowering our carbon footprint across all areas of the organisation is very important to us.

“This work is incredibly beneficial and is the equivalent of taking 45 cars off the road. Virtualisation has also boosted the overall efficiency of our ICT infrastructure, improving performance and reliability, and reducing operational risk and energy consumption.

“We now have a more robust technology framework with less potential points of failure, and we have been able to cut energy bills as well as the amount of administration time and effort needed.

“Our in-house ICT Service had started to investigate the potential of virtualisation, but calling in the specialists from ITPS has allowed us to speed up the process and with their help, future-proof our ICT platform at the same time.

“Fully virtualising our server estate will help us to better protect our organisation and cut costs, and this is the latest in a long line of successful projects where the help of ITPS has been invaluable to us.”

ITPS consultant Ralph Flemming added: “The majority of the average IT budget is spent on admin, maintenance and support, and virtualisation is fast becoming the smart way to make sure a business gets maximum benefit from its IT budget.

“One of the key benefits is improved business continuity. Many public sector clients now demand proof of business continuity plans when putting projects out to tender, and this factor will become an increasingly crucial, ‘must have’ element in all types and sizes of organisations.”

This is the latest in a chain of contract wins for ITPS, which aims to capture a large slice of the lucrative virtualisation market, as a growing number of organisations look to technology to help them strengthen business continuity and cut costs.

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