London, October 24, 2011 -
The Eden Project is a unique organization - a tourist attraction,
an educational charity and a social enterprise. Based in Cornwall,
the Eden Project attracts over a million visitors every year to its
exhibits, events, workshops and educational programs reminding
people of their connection to the natural world. To balance its
commitment to achieving a flexible, easy-to manage environment
within budget limitations, the Eden project moved to a shared
infrastructure based on NetApp, eliminating inefficiencies by
centralising data, facilitating management and building in agility
for future growth.
Faced with increased data growth, generated
by multiple research projects on the natural world, the previously
outsourced IT infrastructure had outlived its limits both in terms
of capacity and performance. The challenges were multiple; find the
optimal way to look after and work with that data post-project and
manage the ongoing burden of the core business data, while
delivering flexibility, innovation and driving down costs. The Eden
Project worked with NetApp partner, S3 Consulting to deploy a
shared infrastructure combining a NetApp FAS2020 array with 7Tb of
capacity and two VMware ESX enterprise virtualization platforms.
Built on an existing Cisco network architecture, the infrastrucutre
addressed all of these challenges in a cost effective manner.
Centered on the NetApp storage array, the
revamped virtual environment took only a month to implement and
proved its efficient IT promise with an ROI payback within 18
months. The 75% server replacement, the centralisation of data and
the ability of NetApp deduplication to unlock efficiency gains have
all contributed to a more flexible IT architecture. "The best news
is that these benefits have not come at a high price. The cost of
the project has been offset not only in efficiency terms but also
in the solution's flexibility and its ability to scale for the
future," says Jon Curry, director of HR and ICT.
"The direct links between the technology and
the cost efficiencies have brought into the spotlight how much a
shared IT infrastructure can benefit an organization faced with
even the most complex storage problems. Choosing NetApp has allowed
the Eden Project to combine efficiency gains with a single,
easy-to-manage platform for extensive virtualization even to the
desktop level," explains XXX (insert country spokesperson) at
NetApp.
Press Contact:
Champion Communications
+44 (0)20 7637 2587
netapp@championcomms.com