news Village Roadshow, the Melbourne-based company that has been entertaining Australians since 1954 with theme parks, resorts and attractions, cinemas, music and DVD distribution, has moved its data storage to the cloud. The Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) data centre model for Village Roadshow was built on NetApp hardware and provided by service provider Interactive to manage Village Roadshow’s substantial data growth.
Previously, Village Roadshow managed its own datacentre, located at its Jam Factory headquarters in Melbourne. However, incessantly increasing data demands obliged the company to look for alternative, more efficient IT solutions.
CIO of Village Roadshow, David Kindlen stated that the company had been running out of space to store its data. “We needed a high performance and scalable managed production storage solution that provided strong business continuity capabilities at a competitive price to an in-house purchase,” said Kindlen.
Director of sales at Interactive, Simon Durkin, explained that the company’s Tier III data centre in Melbourne is intended to house data specifically for customers dealing with considerable data growth.
“Village Roadshow already had existing NetApp hardware installed onsite, so the customer was happy with our recommendations to move its data to our NetApp-based environment.” The NetApp FAS3170 storage system stores all of Village Roadshow’s data. Village Roadshow’s storage in the IaaS model is wholly flexible and capable of keeping up with the ongoing data growth.
Speaking about the increased demand for cloud services from customers, Durkin said: “We expect this growth to continue as more businesses seek the financial and business benefits of the cloud, combined with the security of our Tier III data centre. Interactive has made it a priority to provide world-class cloud solutions by investing in the best local talent and building our business on the technologies of trusted partners including NetApp. We are proud to be able to work with NetApp to build on the folio of services we already provide Village Roadshow.”
Vice President and Managing Director, NetApp ANZ, Peter O’Connor highlighted Interactive’s model for Village Roadshow as a terrific example of how massive amounts of data can be moved easily to the cloud without the bother of losing data or enduring downtime. “Not only is Village Roadshow benefiting from the fact that it now doesn’t have the overhead of storing its ever-growing data onsite, but it gains greater efficiency and agility benefits that can be reverberated throughout its entire business,” O’Connor said.
opinion/analysis
While Village Roadshow hasn’t provided much detail here about what it’s actually using IaaS for, or what levels of data is being stored with Interactive, it’s still good to see some more customer examples in the cloud computing area. They are a bit thin on the ground in Australia at the moment. If anyone knows of further examples of Australian organisations adopting any of the particular variants of cloud computing (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS and so on), please don’t hesitate to get in contact with us about them.
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Opinion/analysis by Renai LeMay