Top award for London Gateway’s Information Technology

London Gateway, London: A unique and highly flexible state-of-the-art datacentre architecture has won DP World London Gateway’s Information Technology Team a top award for innovation.

London Gateway was named winner of the NetApp Visionary Leadership Innovation Award for 2013 for a data storage and management solution, which provides flexibility, reliability and predictability, as well as cost-effectiveness and a reduced carbon footprint, for the UK’s new deepwater container port and logistics park.

London Gateway IT decided to implement the NetApp/Flexpod data storage and management solution. “We needed a solution for our mission-critical operational systems to ensure maximum availability, scalability and uptime based on NetApp technology,” says Bob Post, DP World London Gateway’s Head of IT & Systems.

“Our virtualised data centre supports the whole London Gateway infrastructure, with all types of applications being delivered – from normal office products through a whole host of mission critical applications, including the Terminal Operating Systems and various automated concepts controlling all the container movements in the park.”

“The move towards this start-of-the-art datacentre architecture, as opposed to more traditional IT architecture, allows improved agility and quick reactions to capacity and performance requirements on an “As Needed” basis during the various phases of the project, says Matthew Tweedie, London Gateway Infrastructure Manager. “Once the port is operational, we expect our data storage to grow substantially; with this solution, it can be rapidly released with minimal management effort, reducing IT operational costs.”

In addition, the architecture used is very environmentally friendly. It allows high levels of asset utilisation (75% compared to 25% reported for most infrastructures from the client/server generation), and this massively reduces power, cooling and footprint.

NetApp’s 9th Annual Innovation Awards were presented at Silicon’s Valley Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. “This event gave NetApp the opportunity to shine a light on our most innovative customers around the world,” said NetApp. “These customers have achieved IT agility and are taking their businesses in new and exciting directions.”

NetApp said its Visionary Leadership award “highlights the people who have broken down barriers between IT and the business/organisation, turning technology innovation into a major driver of success”.

Bob Post says: “DP World encourages innovation throughout the company to enhance business products and services. Winning an innovation award also recognises the changing IT role from a pure technical role into a more strategic role. And last but not least, this award is well-deserved recognition for all IT staff at London Gateway working very hard on one of the largest, most complex and most prestigious projects in our company.”