Ogilvy Cape Town, a full-service advertising agency, has standardised its data storage and recovery solution on Apple`s Xserve servers, completely replacing its PC servers, the agency says.
This is part of a total upgrade for the Ogilvy & Mather advertising group.
Ogilvy Cape Town and its subsidiaries have grown considerably over the last two years, resulting in the need to standardise on a single hardware and software platform, according to the agency. This mirrors the IT strategy which began at Ogilvy`s Gauteng office in 2004.
The Cape Town office is purchasing six Apple Xserves and two Xserve RAIDs (storage devices) from Cape Town Apple centre, Digicape.
While Ogilvy, along with a number of other advertising agencies, have been using Apple equipment for many years, this is the first time it has decided to completely replace their PC servers with those from Apple, says Digicape director, Gaynor McArthur.
"It is quite a bold step. Previously the Xservers were used mainly to control just its other Apple hardware," she says.
It is estimated that it will take approximately a month to migrate all existing information onto the new servers, with the bulk of the time being spent on data cleaning to ensure information integrity.
Cost effective
Ogilvy`s total investment with Digicape was less than the company would have paid for a Windows equivalent, says Digicape. The total cost included the hardware, back-up software, installation and training, with Cape Town transaction being worth just under R500 000.
There is a strong commitment to Apple across the group, says David Breytenbach, group IT manager at Ogilvy SA.
"It is a forward-thinking and innovative brand with good technology. It is also very cost effective as the Apple operating system is included in the hardware cost, which is not the case with other server platforms. In addition, it is more stable and secure than its Windows counterpart," he says.
A key reason for going with Apple technology is the Xserves come with fibre channel technology, which Ogilvy has optimised at a 2GB throughput, says Breytenbach.
"What this means in layman`s terms is that there is lots of network capacity to the server so it won`t be slow and laborious to access information. We can have up to 190 people accessing the servers simultaneously, so we can`t have any bottlenecks," he says.
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