Press Release

Magirus & Codestone complete private & hybrid cloud solution for Axis

IP EXPO, LONDON, Stand G68 – Magirus, a leading European supplier and distributor of IT solutions and services, today announced a vBundle implementation with its business partner, Codestone Group that provides a template for how the channel can adapt to offer cloud services for their customers today.

Codestone Group has provided Axis P.E.D, an independent professional consultancy, with a private and hybrid cloud solution which allows Axis to access applications and services from a private, virtualised server with other services from Codestone’s public cloud.

The backbone of the private cloud is a Magirus vBundle, comprising computing, network, storage, virtualisation and data management technologies from Cisco, VMware and EMC. The vBundle offers an integrated, pre-configured and fully-functional, unified data centre capability, priced specifically for the small and medium sized enterprise. This specially-packaged technology will be demonstrated today by Magirus at IP Expo in London.

The Codestone private and hybrid cloud solution gives Axis employees access to critical applications on demand with high availability; allowing improved utilisation of IT resources and offers room for expansion in the future.

“We specialise in providing support to development projects and strategies including: planning, transportation, environmental and design services. Our consultants spend the majority of their time off-site and require access to applications and data from any location at any time,” said Phil Roden, Consulting Partner, Axis P.E.D. “The private and hybrid cloud solution is allowing us to be far more agile in scaling up IT to support new client projects and respond faster to information requests from them,” he added.

Previously, Axis had to contend with legacy hardware and software and poor bandwidth at its offices in Chester and Manchester. The fact that data was not centralised also meant recurring data back-up and recovery requirements were unsatisfactory.

“Choosing the right distributor is vital. Magirus is at the forefront of delivering private and hybrid cloud technologies to enterprises via its partners. Its vBundle is attractively-priced and importantly, is built upon the same vendor building block technologies that many of the largest enterprise-class public cloud offerings are being built on,” said Dan Hobson, Commercial Director at Codestone Group.

Each vBundle configuration may be tailored by complementary software and hardware from the Magirus portfolio. Axis’ vBundle was coupled with a desktop virtualisation management tool that enables companies to host virtual desktops and applications in the data centre. Now, all of Axis’ data is centralised and backed up in its Chester data centre, it is highly secure, risk compliant and delivered over a thin client. Applications being used by Axis include: Alternate Data Stream (ADS), Microsoft Exchange, file & print, financials and Computer Aided Design (CAD).

Stand G68 - IP Expo 19-20 October, 2011, Earls Court 2, London

The Magirus vBundle is one of four demonstrations on its stand at IP Expo. Under the banner of ‘Today’s Cloud,’ Magirus will illustrate a private cloud scenario, using a vBundle.

“The cloud is one of those over-used terms. Both partners and end-users are still finding their feet and want to know what is possible and available with cloud services today,” said Denise Bryant, UK Managing Director at Magirus. “Our partners are looking for a distributor with experience and expertise to guide them on their journey to becoming a trusted cloud provider. As a major distributor of Cisco, VMware, EMC and VCE Company, we are perfectly placed to do this,” she continued.

The next demonstration is of VMware’s vCloud Connector. vCloud Connector is a cloud computing management tool for transferring workloads between private, public and hybrid clouds. It provides businesses with increased agility, by moving workloads, templates and virtual machines to a public cloud to free up on-premise data centre resources as needed.

Also, Magirus will show a comprehensive, feature-rich, demonstration of Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) Manager which provides unified management of all software and hardware components of the Cisco UCS. At the click of a mouse, organisations can scale up or down their hardware configuration, reaping the benefits of agile and flexible IT infrastructures.

For many businesses today the cost of administering the architecture is still a big issue. Finally, Magirus will demonstrate how to enable efficient storage for cloud computing, whilst realising proven cost reductions, with EMC’s VNX and VNXe unified storage portfolios.

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