SACD, whose container terminal facilities are located at all the major ports, including the inland port of Johannesburg, has completed a project to move from a Unix to an Intel-based architecture with the assistance of Datacentrix.
The result is an environment that has increased capacity, flexibility and mean time to develop, while showing an improvement in its cost profiles to less than those incurred five years ago.
According to Taraneh Afnan-Holmes, SACD director, the company recognised that the cost of ownership of its Unix architecture was far higher than projected and the availability of the technology and associated skills were not optimal.
"SACD`s model is very specific," she adds. "We are a company supplying multiple services to the shipping industry, as well as being an importer and exporter and providing a land-side arm to the logistics supply chain. The new IT infrastructure allows the company and its business model, which has changed over the past few years, to be far more nimble."
Freddie Mayer, IT executive at SACD, maintains that by migrating to a Microsoft environment, SACD is able to address its risk and cost concerns. "A key consideration was the fact that there are an abundance of Microsoft skills within the local market, a problem area previously that has improved."
"Since our decision two years ago to make the move, we were able to write off the associated costs, resulting in an IT budget that has actually decreased over the years, not a common occurrence nowadays," says Afnan-Holmes.
Datacentrix provided and implemented the IBM xSeries backbone infrastructure for between 200 and 250 workstations and helped scope the hardware requirements for the project. "The benefits of our partnership with Datacentrix have been the company`s understanding of the SACD business case and its excellent technical advice," adds Mayer.
"SACD had the foresight to act on its infrastructure planning a number of years ago," says Gerald Painter, business unit manager at Datacentrix. "This has allowed the company to be sufficiently up-to-date technology-wise to communicate with any customer in any format. Datacentrix`s technical skills and competitive pricing as an IBM Direct Tier 1 Business Partner have equipped us to assist SACD in this regard."
The IBM infrastructure has been implemented and is being managed by an integrated suite of point solutions. SACD is in the process of rolling out a disaster recovery strategy and moving its database from DB2 to Microsoft.
Datacentrix also assisted SACD to implement an IBM SAN using fibre optic disks and a backup solution to protect its data, in addition to advising the organisation on its domain upgrade from NT to Windows 2000.
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