Durban, 08 May 2008
IT infrastructure, solutions and services provider, Datacentrix, has been awarded a new project with KwaZulu-Natal-based Sanyati Holdings, a broad-based civil engineering and construction company with nearly two decades of experience.
As a rapidly growing company, Sanyati has a high level of risk exposure to IT, with its previous environment leading to a lack of effective productivity. Recognising this, Sanyati has appointed Datacentrix to implement a comprehensive IT solution.
"We ascertained that Sanyati's IT infrastructure had inadequate capacity for current and future IT needs, as well as challenges in terms of staffing and management of the IT system," says Marlene Brady, account manager at Datacentrix. "A final point of concern was the urgent nature of rectifying these issues and the related time constraints."
Says Clive Whittington, IT manager at Sanyati Holdings: "Once we had decided that we needed to upgrade our accounting packages, it became immediately obvious that our server system would be inadequate as a platform for these new technologies. In addition to this, we needed to ensure a more stable platform for our e-mail, Internet access and backup software."
In terms of the project, Datacentrix recommended that critical IT functions be facilitated in a central data centre managed by existing staff and building an infrastructure that catered for the current requirements without sacrificing future flexibility. It needed to be robust and make provision for component failure, as well as human error. Datacentrix's solution comprised of three components: the first being the processing component; the second, the storage component and the third being management. The processing component consists of a blade server chassis populated with eight blades, which will host most of Sanyati's IT services.
The storage component consists of a storage area network (SAN), which will provide the majority of the storage requirements of the data centre. And in terms of the services component, the whole of the data centre solution is optimised towards the managing of services and data. This ensures that IT services can be deployed and made available in an optimal and efficient manner.
Brady says: "We were chosen by Sanyati because of our high level of technical and sales skills. The company saw the value Datacentrix added to the business during the consulting and pre-sales phases and also the value of our partnership with HP, especially in accessing the right products at the right price. In addition, Datacentrix's technical competence and its ability to deliver irrespective of the project time constraints, which were mainly driven by the development and implementation of JD Edwards (JDE) software."
"Our decision to partner with Datacentrix was based on several factors: the company's competitive pricing; its solid reputation as a listed company; and the effectiveness of its staff," explains Whittington. "The blade server solution is a cutting-edge technology and we were more than satisfied that Datacentrix's technical staff would be able to both implement the solution effectively and assist us from a support perspective further down the line."
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