16.09.2012

MCS saves A-Plant £45,000

MCS in partnership with IBM claims to have helped A-Plant, achieve substantial cost savings, including a reduction in annual electricity costs of £45,000, by deploying a pioneering virtualised Information Technology storage system from IBM, as well as helping design and deliver a new disaster recovery strategy.

At the same time A-Plant says it is benefiting from reduced down-time and response times in its, gaining improvements in IT performance of 20-30 percent.

Brian Francis, technical services director at MCS, was given the responsibility of finding, selecting and then implementing this new storage and disaster recovery solution. The IBM Storwize V7000 disk system is one of the first to be deployed in Europe and use the replication server environment, it was also implemented in a single weekend.
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Andy Wortley, IT director at A-Plant, said: “Our MCS hire management software lies at the centre of our operation, processing one transaction a second and giving us full visibility of the 110,000 items of equipment we hire out. We couldn't afford for a hardware failure to happen at any time as this would run the risk of eroding customer satisfaction and missing opportunities to increase profits. We made the decision to replace our end-of-life servers, and at the same time, we also took the opportunity to ensure business continuity by implementing a disaster recovery plan.”

"Implementing the IBM Storwize V70000 solution has smashed our down-time targets and improved performance by an average of 20 to 30 percent, now business continuity is practically guaranteed. By replacing our legacy storage infrastructure and a virtualisation project we have consolidated our 80 servers into eight resulting in annual savings in electricity costs of £45,000!"

Francis added: “It has been a pleasure to work with both A-Plant and IBM using state-of-the-art technology in such a significant IT infrastructure project and very rewarding to see that their investment in their IT is now providing real financial and strategic returns.”