€1/2m Deal Sees Dell Flying High 

Dell Beats HP and IBM for €1/2m Storage Deal with Irish Low Cost Carrier RyanAir

In a three way competition against HP and IBM Network Appliances, Dell has won a major storage solution deal with Ryanair worth almost €500,000 that will see major efficiencies delivered in the airline's data centre.

With such a disparate business environment, distributed over 32 bases across 26 countries, Ryanair needed a solution that would allow it to move to a consolidated, virtualized environment, in order to increase data processing capacity across the company, while reducing maintenance and down time. It also required a Disaster Recovery solution to be implemented. In order to meet these challenges the company decided to upgrade its data centre infrastructure, designing, implementing and managing a three to five year virtualized server and storage solution to run the company's internal IT infrastructure.

Dell provided Ryanair with a 10GbE EqualLogic (EQL) solution, a simplified storage solution, which delivers 10 times more storage performance for virtualization and high throughput business applications. Uniquely, the innovative EQL solution provides Ryanair with the opportunity to scale seamlessly over 5 years to meet its future growth needs, and also provides the company with a simple, robust backup solution to meet its business continuity requirements.

Eric Neville, CIO, Ryanair said: "As Ryanair continues to grow, there are increasing demands on the data centre and we needed a solution that would give us the foundation to build a virtualized environment to allow the company to scale for future expansion. Of critical importance, is that the virtualized and simplified storage solution provided by Dell has dramatically reduced the time required to look after the system, freeing up the IT team to focus on delivering more value to the business."

John Stobie, Regional Sales Manager, Dell said: "By designing this EqualLogic solution, we have provided Ryanair with an open, capable and affordable solution to its infrastructure requirements. The solution delivers ease of management while offering increased flexibility and resilience, seamless scalability and a reduced total cost of ownership. It allows Ryanair IT to focus more on how they can help meet the company's business requirements now and in the future."

The deal also sees a Dell Service Delivery Manager (SDM) working with Ryanair to get a complete understanding of their infrastructure and processes. In providing proactive support, Dell implements a Strategic Services Plan (SSP) that will detail how Ryanair engages with Dell's Expert Centre in Cherrywood and also Dell's European Command Centre based in Limerick. Included is a Dell ProSupport Enterprise Wide Contract (EWC) which is Dell's premium Support offering.

It is not known if the contract was awarded purely on price and service negotiation, however it is interesting to note that both Dell and Ryanair are known for their direct sales channels and their promotion of lower cost models.

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