HP, Oriel assist WWF-Australia with conservation

Gordon Peters
Friday, 19 March 2010 12:52

IT Industry - Market

Hewlett-Packard has teamed with IT services vendor, Oriel Technologies, to implement a new virtualisation solution for WWF-Australia in a move designed to lower the environmental impact of WWF's IT and deliver cost savings.

According to WWF-Australia CFO, Paul Molloy, the organisation wanted to 'take advantage of more energy efficient technologies in their data centre and reduce the operational and support costs associated with running a multi-vendor platform.,' which he said 'drove the decision to undertake a data centre refresh which was completed in February 2010.'

'As a conservation organisation we wanted to lead by example, using more energy efficient technologies that would reduce our power draw. Also operating as a not-for-profit, it is important for us to minimise the operational costs of our IT so that we can put more of our resources towards our conservation efforts.'

According to Paul Robson, director of enterprise storage, servers and networking for HP South Pacific, legacy, multi-vendor environments can be difficult and costly to run and 'by standardising on newer, more energy efficient systems, WWF-Australia will not only reduce their support and running costs, but will also reduce their power requirements.'

Choosing HP for their fully virtualised solution, WWF-Australia has replaced aged Sun and IBM technologies with HP BladeSystems running VMWare, HP EVA Storage Array Networks and HP ProCurve switches.

The solution was designed and implemented by Oriel Technologies who will provide ongoing managed services. Oriel has also become a sponsor of WWF-Australia, in support of their conservation work.

'Although we wanted to deliver a cost-conscious solution to benefit this not-for-profit organisation, we also ensured that Oriel and HP delivered a high quality solution that provided scope to grow,' said Jake Wynne, managing director of Oriel Technologies.

'Implementing HP end-to-end provides a solid platform for business continuity and disaster recovery.

'Future plans include the implementation of HP Thin Clients, for a VMware desktop virtualisation solution, that will further reduce energy consumption. It will also enable WWF to more easily scale up their desktop fleet each year, and support the increased workforce needed for Earth Hour occurring on 27 March 2010.'