Five-star golf resort the K Club has invested €100,000 on a virtualised IT system that includes a private cloud and a high-speed network. The next-generation investment is part of a plan by the company to be carbon neutral by 2020.
The K Club has introduced a policy of using the most advanced and sustainable technology available to underpin all of its hotel, retail, conference and leisure facilities.
Datapac was awarded a contract to consult and provide solutions for the core ICT infrastructure upgrade. This has included reducing the number of physical servers by more than 90pc, running VMware’s cloud operating system.
The new solution is driving enhanced application performance, higher levels of service availability, and significant carbon and cost savings.
“As one of the world’s leading business and leisure destinations, we have to continually invest in the most advanced technology systems to facilitate the high expectations of our members and guests,” explained Mojtaba Akbari, head of IT for The K Club.
“The solution also provides us with many benefits, including improved management of our entire ICT infrastructure, significant cost savings and a major reduction in our carbon footprint.”
Projected savings over the next five years include power savings of €90,000, a 30pc reduction in ICT maintenance costs and offset hardware procurement costs of circa €50,000.
The K Club’s new ultra speedy network
In addition to the virtualised solution, The K Club has rolled out a new ultra high-speed network across the resort with Datapac. The Cisco IP fibre guarantees internet speeds of between 100Mbps and 1Gbps.
This improves the speed and performance of many applications at the resort, including the Property Management and Food & Beverage systems.
It also enables some of the world’s Fortune 500 corporate guests to hold major international conferences at The K Club and be able to run bandwidth-intensive applications, such as high-definition video conferencing.
The K Club’s ICT upgrade also helps to safeguard the availability of the hotel’s data, business critical applications and network infrastructure.
All critical business and customer data is continuously replicated and backed up to an offsite location. In a disaster recovery situation, system downtime has been reduced from 24 hours to just 10 minutes. This minimises The K Club’s potential for loss of revenue and customer dissatisfaction in the event of an emergency.
The K Club has some further interesting technology developments in the pipeline, including looking to harness the power of the river Liffey to create its own electricity supply for the estate and already has much of the relevant infrastructure in place.
“For almost 30 years, Datapac has been providing technology solutions to clients throughout Ireland,” said Pat O’Leary, business development manager at Datapac.
“We are always particularly delighted to work closely with a client like The K Club who is competing at the highest level on the international stage.
“Its focus on high-quality and sustainable IT solutions is a major part of their success. We believe that our strategic IT partnership with The K Club plays a crucial role as they continue to innovate and grow,” O’Leary said.
