MJ Flood Technology secures €1.2m IT infrastructure contract with NUI Galway

MJ Flood Technology has announced a €1.2 million IT infrastructure refresh and associated managed services contract with NUI, Galway.

Under the terms of the contract, MJ Flood Technology will perform a full compute, server and storage refresh at NUI Galway’s primary data centre with automatic failover to a secondary on-campus facility for redundancy. The new infrastructure will support teaching, multimedia learning and research for the university’s 17,000 students and 2,400 staff.

Based on a combination of HP server and storage technology, the refresh essentially creates a hybrid cloud environment for IT service delivery.  A number of critical applications will be moved to the data centre and HP’s 3PAR StoreServ hardware will provide critical, redundant storage capacity for the university’s demanding research and enterprise communities.

Commenting on the investment programme, Director of ISS with NUI Galway, Sean O’Farrell said:

“This project is about bringing IT service delivery to a level which will support the university’s ambitions in terms of collaborative teaching, learning and research for the next three to five years, enabling us to exploit cloud integration, leverage our existing data centre capacity and position us for future growth. The investment provides us with a single, unified, managed IT infrastructure with 24 x 7 x 365 high availability and pro-active support.”

The design philosophy behind the refresh is based on principles of scalability and agility as James Finglas, managing director with MJ Flood Technology explains:

“We designed the infrastructure to meet NUIG’s current needs and to provide sufficient scalability to allow it to grow and develop in line with academic requirements.  For example, the university estimates data growth at approx. 50TB per annum over the next three to five years, and we’ve built corresponding, flexible storage capacity, which will address the institution’s plans for multimedia learning and digital archiving well into the future.”