News & Events

MJ Flood Technology secures €1.2m IT infrastructure contract with NUI Galway

Dublin, Wednesday, 7th January 2015: Leading cloud computing and IT services provider, MJ Flood Technology today announced a €1.2 million IT infrastructure refresh and associated managed services contract with NUI, Galway

Under the terms of the contract, MJ Flood Technology will perform a full compute, server and storage refresh at NUI Galway’s primary data centre with automatic failover to a secondary on-campus facility for resilient redundancy.

The new infrastructure will support teaching, multimedia learning and research for the university’s 17,000 students and 2,400 staff.

Based on a combination of HP server and storage technology, the refresh essentially creates a hybrid cloud environment for IT service delivery. A number of critical applications will be moved to the data centre and HP’s next generation 3PAR StoreServ hardware will provide critical, redundant storage capacity for the university’s demanding research and enterprise communities.

A robust service level agreement (SLA) for IT monitoring and support will be delivered by technical staff at MJ Flood Technology’s network operations centre through a three-year managed services contract.

Commenting on the investment programme, Director of ISS with NUI Galway, Sean O’Farrell said:

“This project is about bringing IT service delivery to a level which will support the university’s ambitions in terms of collaborative teaching, learning and research for the next three to five years, enabling us to exploit cloud integration, leverage our existing data centre capacity and position us for future growth. The investment provides us with a single, unified, managed IT infrastructure with 24 x 7 x 365 high availability and pro-active support.”

The design philosophy behind the refresh is based on principles of scalability and agility as James Finglas, managing director with MJ Flood Technology explains:

“We designed the infrastructure to meet NUIG’s current needs and to provide sufficient scalability to allow it to grow and develop in line with academic requirements. For example, the university estimates data growth at approx. 50TB per annum over the next three to five years, and we’ve built corresponding, flexible storage capacity, which will address the institution’s plans for multimedia learning and digital archiving well into the future.”

Mr O’Farrell cites Big Data as one of the major IT challenges facing the University.

“Researchers need to be able to spin up massive data sets at very short notice and without the need for complex local technology. Our new infrastructure will allow the University protect data assets that are currently stored across the campus, ensuring key data sets are backed up and secure. We need to be able to provide infrastructure/storage on demand and this project will enable the department respond effectively to such requests.”

The contract was awarded to MJ Flood Technology following a competitive tender process. It follows the completion of another cloud project, when the company’s technical team assisted in the migration of 55,000 student and alumni email accounts from an on premise system to Microsoft’s cloud-based Office 365 email and collaboration platform.

Mr O’Farrell said:

“We are particularly impressed by the strong feature set of HP’s next generation server and storage infrastructure and we believe our managed services contract will allow ISS staff to engage in a more strategic way with the various communities on campus.”