By Prince Osuagwu
ONE of the leading systems integration companies in Nigeria, Resourcery Plc, said it has deployed the very first Cisco Unified Computing System in Nigeria. This business solution was deployed for Vodacom Business Nigeria (Formerly known as Gateway) as a means of reducing the complexity in the management of disparate components within its Data Centre. This represents another first for the wholly Nigerian company.

The Cisco Unified Computing System is a converged Data Centre platform which delivers smart and programmable infrastructure. From a technical perspective, Cisco Data Centre Fabric offers exceptional architectural flexibility.

A single infrastructure can support a diverse set of emerging requirements, such as Cloud computing, Big Data, Virtualization and Service provider-level scale. It generally helps an organization protect its investment while incrementally adding innovative capabilities without having to deal with operational inconsistencies.

Highlighting the importance of this business solution to his organization, Mr Tunde Dada, Information Technology Manager, Vodacom Business Nigeria said his organization’s business processes have been greatly enhanced by the deployment of the Cisco UCS. He noted among other things that it has reduced business risk and cost as well as improved his organization’s IT agility.

Mr Dada stated that “As a savvy organization, we understand the financial and operational benefits of moving from infrastructure silos to a virtualized, shared environment. Not even the short term hesitation of transition due to potential short-term business disruptions and long-term architectural inflexibility could stop us from tapping into this technology of the future.

Our responsiveness to future business changes is clearly demonstrated in our investment in this technology and we appreciate Resourcery’s effort in making this cost-effective virtualization solution a reality.”

Speaking in the same vein, Seyi Fajobi, the Systems Engineer in charge of the project from Resourcery, noted that the Cisco UCS is a predesigned, base configuration that can be scaled up for greater performance and capacity.

The device can also be scaled out for environments that need consistent, multiple deployments. That means Vodacom Business Nigeria can size and optimize it to accommodate different use cases, including application workloads such as: Microsoft SQL Server, Exchange 2010, Microsoft SharePoint, VDI (VMware View) and Secure Multitenancy (SMT) environments.

He added that “The solution is a single platform, built from unified computing, fabric, and storage technologies, that’ll enable our client scale to meet the largest Data Centre requirements without disruption or architectural changes in the integrated components.

It would also enable Vodacom Business centrally manage all its infrastructure pools as well as open design management framework that integrates with its existing third-party infrastructure management solutions.”

Corroborating what Mr Seyi Fajobi said, Mrs ABiola Njoku, the Project Manager in-charge, summed up the versatility of the technology by saying; “This Cisco Unified Computing System infrastructure is the future.

Organizations can run their entire business on an integrated and verified platform that is deployed in its Data Centre in just a matter of hours. This is where everybody’s going to be in 2012 and Vodacom Business Nigeria is already there.” In his own contribution, Managing Director of Resourcery Tani Fafunwa said that “for us in Resourcery, our job is to provide technological business solutions for our clients.”

We strive to find better and efficient ways of doing this by ensuring our in-house Engineers are consistently up-to-date on latest technologies. That is what you clearly see in this project. The Solution is new in Nigeria but as usual, we have blazed the trail again.”