DMG Group, an Irish-owned company providing information management services to business, has signed a virtualisation and managed services contract valued at €70,000. As part of the deal, the company expects to save close to €15,000 per year, having reduced the number of physical servers from 20 to three.
DMG is the parent company of brands such as Filestores, Shred-it, Scan Image Services, Archives Consulting Services, NeedMoreSpace and TMT. Other brands within the group include Two Men & A Truck and DMG Business Centres, which operate in the moving and storage sector. The firm employs 217 people across its head office in Dublin and at offices in Craigavon, Cork and Kilkenny.
Customer numbers
The group has more 5,000 customers within the state and semi-state sectors, as well as legal, banking, insurance, medical and technology sectors. It had seen its data growing by 20pc year-on-year due to a combination of organic growth and increasing customer demand for services such as data management, document storage and scanning. Believing this trend would continue and potentially increase, DMG decided to review its entire server infrastructure.
DMG awarded Datapac the contract to provide the services. The IT services provider said the virtualisation solution would pay for itself within five years. By adopting Datapac’s managed virtualisation model, the DMG Group has reduced the capital expenditure that would have been required to buy additional physical servers. In addition, a reduced server fleet will significantly reduce maintenance and energy costs, and as a result saves the company around €15,000 per annum.
DMG Group’s online strategy
DMG Group has an online strategy that encourages its customers to use the web for services such as ordering and document searches. According to Datapac, the stability and inbuilt fault tolerance offered by virtualisation allows DMG to provide a higher quality user experience and removes risk from its strategy. Document retrieval speeds, which are an increasingly important part of DMG Group’s information and records management business, have also been sped up as a result of the new infrastructure.
As part of the deal, DMG also upgraded its IT maintenance cover to include a full suite of managed services, such as proactive remote monitoring and management of all IT systems and servers.
“Our customers are experiencing an exponential growth in their physical and electronic information. Accordingly, we needed to address our current and future server requirements, and felt that a virtualised environment gave us the flexibility, security and scalability we needed,” said Edward Hanrahan, DMG Group IT manager. He added that Datapac managed the entire migration project without affecting the DMG’s day-to-day operations.
By Gordon Smith
Photo: Tom Hefferon, CEO, DMG Group; Nick Wall, Datapac; Stuart McLoughlin, Datapac; and Edward Hanrahan, group IT manager, DMG Group
