The VMworld Europe 2012 winners are:
Best virtualisation and server consolidation project: Tiger Wheel & Tyre Best virtualisation and server consolidation project: The National Trust Best virtualisation for disaster recovery project: Catalent Pharma Solutions Best Desktop virtualisation project: Colt Technology Services Best private cloud project: Bull SAS Best Home Office/Remote Office project: DER Deutsches Reisebüro
Six European IT projects have won the Best of VMworld Europe 2012 user awards at the VMworld Europe 2012 event in Barcelona.
A panel of expert judges from the fields of cloud and virtualisation selected Tiger Wheel & Tyre, The National Trust, DER Deutsches Reisebüro, Catalent Pharma Solutions, Bull SAS and Colt Technologies as winners for their respective IT projects.
The judges of the third annual Best of VMworld Europe awards assessed the entries and selected the winners based on overall innovation, systems performance improvement, cost reduction, easing the management burden, new use in marketplace and improved efficiencies and business processes.
The judges said the projects brought infrastructure efficiency and cost savings to their enterprises and also demonstrated innovative use of virtualisation technologies and green credentials.
The awards, hosted by TechTarget, covered product categories, including virtualisation and server consolidation, desktop virtualisation, disaster recovery and a private cloud computing project, as well as a best-of-show winner.
There were five categories: best virtualisation and server consolidation project; best virtualisation for disaster recovery project; best remote-office/home-office deployment project; best private cloud project; and best desktop virtualisation project.
For the first time, the judges picked two winners in the virtualisation and server consolidation category: Tiger Wheel & Tyre, a division of TiAuto; and The National Trust.
Presenter and virtualisation expert Mike Laverick said: “This goes to show that, despite growing use of new technologies such as cloud computing, there is still room for doing simple server virtualisation and finding IT efficiencies."
Best virtualisation and server consolidation project: Tiger Wheel & Tyre “We have achieved 100% virtualisation and saved €2.6m in capital expenses in the process”
Tiger Wheel & Tyre
Tiger Wheel & Tyre, a division of TiAuto, was awarded the best virtualisation and server consolidation project award. It also won the best of show award for its innovative use of technology.
Pictured above are David van Vuuren and Melody Fourie, accepting the certificates for Tiger Wheel & Tyre for the best virtualisation and server consolidation project award and the best of show award, at the VMworld Europe 2012 event in Barcelona.
“Whilst it initially appears to be a straightforward virtualisation and consolidation project, TWT have been fairly innovative in their use of Veeam for performing some tricky upgrades to business-critical systems. That sort of ingenuity is what I like about IT,” said one of the judges.
Tiger Wheel & Tyre’s IT infrastructure includes VMware vSphere 5.0 virtualisation platform and Veeam Backup & Replication 6.0 and eight blade servers.
“We have achieved 100% virtualisation and saved R2.6m in capital expenses in the process,” the project owners said.
Tiger Wheel & Tyre also won the Best of Show award for its innovative use of technology.
Best virtualisation and server consolidation project: The National Trust "The National Trust boasts the greenest credentials of all"
Michael Poore, VMworld Europe 2012 judge
UK’s National Trust also won the award in the best virtualisation and server consolidation category at the VMworld Europe 2012 event in Barcelona.
It was tough call to pick a winner and both the projects showed innovation and effective use of virtualisation, the judges said.
“Of the six, the National Trust seems to boast the greenest credentials of all. Their project has delivered them clear cost savings and enhances their carbon footprint,” said Michael Poore, one of the judges.
The judges noted that the National Trust’s IT infrastructure used solar winds monitoring software to provide early warning of any potential performance issues or faulty hardware.
The National Trust’s aim was to consolidate its existing infrastructure and to migrate it from a physical to a virtual platform to reduce power consumption and increase energy savings.
Best virtualisation for disaster recovery project: Catalent Pharma Solutions "Catalent utilised virtualisation and disaster recovery technologies to mitigate both a unique business risk and to solve a unique problem”
VMworld Europe 2012 judge
Pharmaceutical company Catalent Pharma Solutions won the best virtualisation for disaster recovery (DR) project award at the VMworld Europe 2012 event in Barcelona.
“It has got a good story as the DR covered natural disasters,” one of the judges said.
In March 2011, a fire damaged servers at its Corby site, which contained six mission-critical VMs running applications related to inventory, production and shipping.
The fire could have caused a complete interruption of services to its business. However the IT team had a full backup and disaster recovery policy in place. Its virtualisation and backup infrastructure comprised VMware vSphere 4.1 and Veeam Backup & Replication 6.0 products.
"Catalent utilised virtualisation and disaster recovery technologies to mitigate both a unique business risk and to solve a unique problem,” one of the judges said.
The IT team demonstrated that the investment in DR strategy was justified to avoid costly outages, the judge added.
Best Desktop virtualisation project: Colt Technology Services
Colt Technology Services had designed and implemented an innovative cloud hosted desktop virtualisation product scalable to 20,000 virtual desktops across two datacentres, in conjunction with Agilisys for use by customers including UK local authorities.
As a multi-tenant desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) implementation, Colt could fully automate the deployment, configuration and provisioning of virtual desktops and the data store, using products such as VMware View and VMware vSphere in combination with Atlantis ILIO Center. Using the automation available in Atlantis's ILIO Center, Colt’s IT executives could provision and operationalise multiple racks of servers for thousands of users in under an hour.
Best private cloud project: Bull SAS
Bull SAS won the award for best private cloud project at the VMworld Europe 2012 event in Barcelona. According to the judges, Bull SAS’s R&D labs optimised its hardware with 2TB RAM hosts, delivering 600+ VMs and it is still growing.
What distinguished Bull SAS’s cloud project was its pre-integration between hardware and software to leverage all the vCloud suite functionalities as well as the integration with security products to provide a highly secure private cloud infrastructure.
Best home office/remote office project: DER Deutsches Reisebüro
Germany’s DER Deutsches Reisebüro GmbH Co. OHG was declared the winner in the best home office/remote office project category at the VMworld Europe 2012 event in Barcelona.
DER Deutsches Reisebüro uses desktop virtualisation across its 560 branch offices across Germany, which is managed by just 3 IT staff.
The objective of its project was to decentralise IT. Prior to its desktop virtualisation project, DER Deutsches Reisebüro had no domain integration, no backup of user data and the recovery time was as long as 24 hours. The IT solved all its problems and brought long-term cost savings.
