Origina Wins Best SMB Provider Gong

Virtualised Environment 4 Lakeland Dairies Nets Irish IT Services Provider Award 4 European IT Excellence

Irish IT Services Provider Origina has won Best SMB Solutions Provider at the 2010 European IT Excellence Awards in London, for a virtualised environment project completed in partnership with the Lakeland Dairies IT team.

Origina helped the Lakeland Dairies IT team to  design and implement a virtualised solution  that has  significantly cut Lakeland's risk of downtime, reduced  its costs and  lowered carbon emissions, while also improving delivery times across the organisation.

Lakeland Dairies  IT manager Turlough Farrelly said: "We believe that from working in conjunction with Origina, Lakeland  now has one of the most advanced IT infrastructures in the country right now. The new architecture is easy to manage, resilient and ensures all of our systems, servers and data are always highly-available. Thanks to this virtualised and consolidated solution, we are also seeing a significant reduction in overall costs."

The European IT Excellence Awards recognise best practices in customer solutions by IT providers across Europe. As the only Irish technology company to win an award at this year's event, Origina beat stiff competition in its category from shortlisted companies from the UK, Italy and Serbia.

The judges were particularly impressed by Origina's ability to work with the Lakelands IT team to unify and simplify Lakeland's complex IT infrastructure.

Origina business development director Marc Flanagan,(Pictured) said, "We are honoured to win this prestigious award which recognises Origina's ability to perform and compete at the highest levels on theinternational stage. We are delighted that our 'teaming' model of working closely with the customers own IT team has enabled us to achieve this recognition. Lakeland Dairies has become one of Ireland's most successful food production companies by placing technology and
innovation at the heart of its business."

Lakeland Dairies Group is Ireland's second largest dairy co-op. It processes more than a billion litres of milk annually. Headquartered  in Cavan, the Group has more than 600 employees in fi ve locations across the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and the UK and exports to markets throughout Europe, America, Asia and Africa .

Lakeland's IT systems play an integral role in the complete food process from farm to retail. Following growth through a number of mergers and acquisitions, Lakeland built-up a large number of disparate IT systems and servers in several office locations and data centres.

Based on both its strong infrastructure architecture experience, and ability to work closely with the Lakeland IT team, Origina was awarded a contract to work with Lakeland to help consolidate all its  IT systems, implement a more effective disaster recovery solution and perform a complete infrastructure refresh for the Lakeland Group.

Origina consultants, working in partnership with Lakeland's own IT team designed and installed a Compellent storage solution which is an ideal fit for Lakeland's new centralised, virtualised infrastructure which replaced all of the existing physical servers and storage devices acrossthe Lakeland Dairies Group.

As a  result of the solution

•  The number of servers was reduced from 35 in multiple locations to just two virtualised servers in head office, with  two more in a nearby site for disaster recovery;
• 70% saving on power, cooling and electricity costs, with a corresponding reduction in carbon emissions;
• All wintel based disaster recovery has been reduced from five days to less than two hours.
• The new highly available and scalable solution includes two IBM servers to run the new virtualised environment, SAN storage from Compellent, along with Microsoft's HyperV and System Center management software.
•  In addition to providing implementation assistance on this project, Origina also provides comprehensive ongoing training, support and strategic advice.

Origina is one of Ireland's leading IT consulting, services and outsourcing companies, with more than 40 people in its Dublin and London offices.

Established in 1998, it works with government and commercial customers in Ireland, UK, mainland Europe, Caribbean and United States.

Origina's highly certified IT professionals specialise in some of the world's leading hardware and software platforms. Origina's innovative approach - Origina Thinking! - has seen it win numerous high profile awards. Its core philosophy is challenging and visionary.

Lakeland Dairies is Ireland's second largest dairy processing co-operative, and operates within a fifteen county catchment area in the northern half of the island of Ireland.

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