Bannon embracing change for the better
(Link to Business Post Article, September 06 2010)
A technology refresh at Bannon property consultants has reduced IT administration costs for the company.
Bannon manages some of the country’s largest retail centres, such as the Pavilions in Swords, Athlone Town Centre and Whitewater in Newbridge. The solution was designed and deployed by MJ Flood Technology.
‘The property market has undergone a radical transformation in a relatively short period of time,’ said Damian Bannon, IT manager with Bannon. ‘Bannon has had to adapt in line with those changes. Our focus on the twin strands of property management and asset management has put our company firmly back on a path of growth, and this has been one of the chief factors driving our technology refresh,’ he said.
As part of the project, staff at MJ Flood Technology redesigned a new network core to serve the company’s 50 users. The server farm was virtualised using VMware technology, reducing the number of servers from ten to just two. This has resulted in reduced administration overheads and an improvement in speed and performance. ‘New applications can be easily added by simply firing up a new virtual server,’ said Bannon. ‘We no longer have to worry about purchasing or provisioning new hardware. It’s as easy as point and click.’
There is plenty of scope for data growth. ‘HP storage technology plays a key role in the overall virtualisation strategy we defined for Bannon,’ said Declan Owens, sales account manager with MJ Flood Technology. ‘We chose a HP storage area network (SAN) as it provides a consolidated approach to their virtualised infrastructure with efficient data management, and provides 5TB of raw storage capacity, leaving plenty of scope for data growth.’
Bannon said: ‘Data growth has slowed somewhat. Previously, 60 per cent of our data would have consisted of very large Photoshop files, some of which could have been 2GB in size. ‘However, the re-focus of our business to property and asset management has resulted in a more linear growth which can be comfortably catered for by the capacity, resiliency and reliability of the HP SAN.’
