Established in 1996, Antarctica New Zealand develops, manages and administers New Zealand’s activities in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. To ensure this pristine environment is valued, protected and understood, Antarctica New Zealand’s hardware solutions at its Christchurch and Scott Base sites need to be able to meet its significant data processing needs. To do that, Antarctica New Zealand needed a major upgrade to retire equipment dating back to 2002 and to provide the scalable and flexible architecture needed to move the organisation into the future.
Peter Smith, Antarctica New Zealand’s Corporate Services Manager, engaged Gen-i to design a new hardware platform for both locations. The key challenge was that the upgrade needed to be completed in time for the busy summer season, flight dates were in short supply and there was the limited technical support at Scott Base.
“The biggest challenge for the project,” he says, “was ensuring that the Scott Base server environment was ready to be shipped down to Antarctica and set up prior to the busy summer season. We chose Gen-i because they could provide us with a one-stop-shop and deliver everything seamlessly to achieve an excellent result.”
Gen-i’s solution utilised and enhanced the existing VMWare server platform with a VMWare Vi3 solution to enable VMotion and Resource Management. Gen-i also deployed two DL380 servers in Christchurch with VMWare for Antarctica New Zealand and four DL360 servers at Scott Base to replace the two existing servers. Staff at both locations got a desktop upgrade, including training by Auldhouse in MS Office 2007 for Christchurch based staff.
Detailed technical and project planning between Antarctica New Zealand and the Gen-i team ensured all critical milestones were met. That meant sleepless nights for the technical team as they pushed to get server equipment and software ready in time for the flight to Scott Base. Once they had arrived safely, the servers were installed at the Base, tested and confirmed as “good to go” before being handed over to Antarctica New Zealand staff.
Since then, Gen-i has suggested further potential projects for Antarctica New Zealand to enable them to leverage their successfully delivered new platform.