Axon offers hosted virtual platform via Orcon

Service offers savings of around 30% over the usual three-year life-cycle, says Axon

Axon has announced an outsourced virtual platform hosted at Orcon’s Auckland datacentre.

CEO Scott Green says the outsourced service offers flexible access to high bandwidth and high-performance systems at a saving of around 30% over the usual three-year life-cycle of owning and operating hardware.

“We’ve invested around $1 million and expect to be financially positive before the end of our financial year, in October,” he says.

Axon began developing the business case last June, and began design and build in December.

Green says there are three key trends emerging for the next five to 10 years: virtualisation, convergence and software as a service.

“Cost is just a small part of the cost/benefit equation,” he says. “Our offering is also significantly faster to implement and has the additional advantage of customers being able to quickly add more processing power according to business demand.

“They can thus avoid the delays associated with procuring, installing and configuring physical servers for new business functions, and they can achieve this without increasing internal IT staff numbers or adding to the workload of existing staff.”

He says the new service is a key building block in Axon’s “making IT easy” strategy, which the company began rolling out earlier this year. Developments to date include a new service desk platform and a remote performance monitoring service optimised for virtual network environments.

“There’s no upfront investment for customers moving to the virtual service, other than on-boarding service,” he says.

“That involves going from a physical to virtual infrastructure, which is often an opportunity to re-architect and rationalise.”

He says the virtual service can work as an add-on, either as test and development or a production platform, or for disaster recovery.

Axon itself is migrating its internal applications. It will use its existing Newmarket datacentre for disaster recovery.

The new virtual datacentre is running HP BL680C blade servers for VMWare ESX, with VMWare VirtualCentre installed. Storage is based on HP EVA8100 SAN and dual HP EVA8100 storage processors with multiple disk arrays. There are two Cisco 3750 switches for redundant load balancing.

Join the newsletter!

Or

Sign up to gain exclusive access to email subscriptions, event invitations, competitions, giveaways, and much more.

Membership is free, and your security and privacy remain protected. View our privacy policy before signing up.

Error: Please check your email address.

Tags virtualisationOrconaxon

Show Comments
[]