Croke Park implements IT sustainability project

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Pictured left is Edel Creely, Trilogy Technologies, Declan Fanning, GAA, and John Casey, Trilogy Technologies.

11 September 2014

Croke Park has achieved ISO 20121 Event Sustainability Management System International Standard.

The newly launched standard is designed to help venues and organisations recognise their impact on the economy, society and the environment.

“Our core IT infrastructure was one such area identified to improve sustainability. Severs had been procured over time to support specific tasks and projects, resulting in servers employing different operating systems and hardware builds. Conducting updates was, therefore, a complex and time consuming process, whilst additional hardware would often have to be commissioned to support new applications,” said Declan Fanning, IT manager, GAA.

Trilogy Technologies, Croke Park’s IT solutions partner carried out an audit of core server technology infrastructure, and determined a centralised server and storage architecture was required. At the same time Trilogy examined system performance, business needs and future planning to create a project that would ultimately provide Croke Park with a high capacity, high performance centralised solution that would also be cost-effective

Trilogy drew up a strategy with the GAA IT Department to design a Private Cloud solution that encompassed current requirements with future growth while containing Croke Park’s IT budget. As part of this strategy, it focused on new ways to maximise resource efficiency through consolidation and virtualisation. Moving to a virtualised environment would result in improved ease of management with impressive power consumption and air conditioning savings. By consolidating applications that had been running on physical servers throughout the business to virtual servers, IT staff could efficiently manage the applications from a single point of control.

Trilogy implemented a private cloud infrastructure built around NetApp Storage and VMWare VSphere Software. The project has enabled Croke Park to replace more than 30 physical servers. The new infrastructure provides a readily available, fully redundant platform to run its core administration, match day and building management systems while offering automatic failover, business continuity and disaster recovery.

The annual environmental impact results in savings in carbon emissions of 31.61 kg which is equivalent to 13 cars off the road and 42 newly planted broadleaf trees.

“The virtualised cloud based solution … gives Croke Park the stability and performance boost that we needed to meet our sustainability initiatives and reduce costs,” said Fanning. “Sustainability can achieve significant cost savings through resource efficiency.”

 

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