The roadshow moves to the cloud

Peter Dinham
Tuesday, 22 November 2011 16:01

The Melbourne-based international entertainment group, Village Roadshow, has moved to the cloud with an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model built on NetApp and provided by Interactive so it can cope with its massive data growth.

Previously, Village Roadshow managed its own data centre at its Jam Factory headquarters in Melbourne, but due to continually increasing data demands, it was forced to seek alternative, more efficient IT solutions. The company engaged IT services provider, Interactive, whose Tier III data centre is built on NetApp, to provide an IaaS solution to alleviate Village its data management problems.

According to Village Roadshow CIO, David Kindlen the company's data was growing at a 'phenomenal rate,' and it was running out of space to store it. 'We needed a high performance and scalable managed production storage solution that provided strong business continuity capabilities at a competitive price to an in-house purchase. I spoke with Interactive about setting up Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) utilising hardware from NetApp, with whom we already had technology that we were very happy with.'

Under the contract, all of Village Roadshow's data is now stored on the NetApp FAS3170 storage system within Interactive's Tier III data centre in Melbourne, and Kindlen says that since moving to the IaaS model, the company's storage is fully flexible and easily able to cope with the continued data growth.

Director of Sales at Interactive, Simon Durkin said the company's Tier III data centre is specifically designed to house data for customers facing huge data growth. 'Village Roadshow already had existing NetApp hardware installed onsite, so the customer was happy with our recommendations to move its data to our NetApp-based environment.'

'The significant investment we have made in our data centre space and technology has been in anticipation of the increased demand we are seeing from customers for cloud services. We expect this growth to continue as more businesses seek the financial and business benefits of the cloud, combined with the security of our Tier III data centre.

'Interactive has made it a priority to provide world-class cloud solutions by investing in the best local talent and building our business on the technologies of trusted partners including NetApp. We are proud to be able to work with NetApp to build on the folio of services we already provide Village Roadshow.'

And, according to NetAPP Vice President and Managing Director, ANZ, Peter O'Connor said the solution that Interactive has implemented for Village Roadshow is a 'great example of how huge amounts of data can be moved easily to the cloud without the hassle of downtime or data loss.'

'NetApp's service provider partnership with Interactive is one that has gone from strength to strength as the Australian market realises the business flexibility that can be gleaned via IaaS offerings.  Not only is Village Roadshow benefitting from the fact that it now doesn't have the overhead of storing its ever-growing data onsite, but it gains greater efficiency and agility benefits that can be reverberated throughout its entire business.'