Fergal Flanagan, IT manager, IT Carlow, and John Casey, sales director, Trilogy Technologies
Third-level institution IT Carlow has invested €300,000 in the deployment of a private cloud virtualisation project to ensure its ICT facilities have the agility to respond to the current and future needs of its students and staff.
Trilogy Technologies implemented and configured a Flexpod converged private cloud infrastructure, which included Cisco Servers, VMware and NetApp Storage.
A key component in the design phase was for IT Carlow to leverage its existing investment in the Cisco Nexus switching environment previously installed.
The Flexpod Infrastructure hosts a high-performance desktop and application virtualisation solution, running VMware View and Application Jukebox, which is capable of expanding seamlessly to allow the agility to present IT Carlow’s ICT environment to staff and students, whenever, wherever and on whatever device is appropriate for their needs.
Future proofed
“We needed to make long-term strategic decisions about the nature of infrastructure required to support the needs of our staff, student research and stakeholder clients into the next 10-15 years,” said Fergal Flanagan, IT manager at IT Carlow.
“In tandem with the natural ageing of our current ICT infrastructure, and the recent expansion of facilities to incorporate a dedicated high-bandwidth media network to support academic programmes in TV, media and sports analysis, a whole new generation of users had to be facilitated – those growing up in a new era of 24/7 service expectation, high bandwidth always-on internet connectivity, powerful mobile devices and almost 100pc laptop ownership,” Flanagan said.
