Bosasa, a wholly South African owned group of empowerment organisations providing benchmarked integrated full facilities management and risk management services, is saving more than R100 000 per year on service costs since a network upgrade carried out by IT systems, software, hardware and consulting services provider, Datacentrix.
Due to a major flaw in its network core, which led to two weeks of downtime, the company decided that the most cost-efficient route would be to rebuild the network layer using HP ProCurve switches, allowing Bosasa to greatly improve availability as well as map the technology back to business requirements, while leaving scope for later expansion, says Johann Fourie, Bosasa IT manager.
"Our previous network architecture had not been designed according to best practices, so it made sense to start again with the HP solutions, particularly in light of the lifetime guarantee offered on these products," he explains.
Siobhan Hanvey, Datacentrix account manager, says the previous chassis used by Bosasa were only running at a third of their capacity, and the company was paying maintenance fees based on their size. "The ProCurve switches were the ideal choice for Bosasa based on their cost-effectiveness, reliability and proven performance."
"From a user experience point of view, access has been significantly improved and the hardware and configuration are more closely matched to our business needs," continues Fourie. "Not only has there has been a huge difference in the speed of the network and service to customers, but, prior to the project, the company averaged between three and four network related support calls per day. Now it is zero."
Bosasa has also implemented HP ProLiant servers, an HP BladeSystem c-Class blade infrastructure and an HP StorageWorks 8000 Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) RAID storage solution in order to further boost availability and scalability as well as improve redundancy.
According to Fourie, the organisation has already seen an improvement in availability and scalability, with no downtime experienced since the project was completed, as compared to downtime at least once a week within the previous environment. "We feel that the projects completed by Datacentrix have been most successful for Bosasa. The two companies have enjoyed a close historical relationship, with Datacentrix becoming our trusted solution provider, and their after-sales service was crucial to our achievements."
"As one of only two fully accredited HP Elite StorageWorks partners, a fully certified Authorised Support Provider and an HP ProCurve Elite partner, Datacentrix felt that these solutions most closely matched Bosasa's requirements for best-of-breed products to build a more robust network and data centre," adds Kobus Smith, account manager at Datacentrix.
"Not only have these products assisted Bosasa in becoming more efficient from an IT perspective in the shorter term, they will also enable the organisation to grow its technology systems as business needs change."
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