Aperio has the whole package with Interactive’s managed services solution

Wednesday, 27 January, 2010: Australasia’s largest flexible packaging manufacturer, Aperio, has embarked on a landmark IT investment with Interactive, Australia’s leading IT systems availability services provider, which delivers exceptional return on investment for the business’ ICT infrastructure, and sees Interactive grow its portfolio of managed services for Australian businesses.

Interactive will provide managed IT services for Aperio, including co-location via its Sydney data centre, heightened security and faster access to shared services and information for all its thirteen sites in Asia Pacific as the business expands.

“Interactive’s Managed Services solution gives us access to newer infrastructure at a low ongoing cost, delivering the best possible return on investment for our IT expenditure. For the same cost per month, we could upgrade our core site at Chester Hill and still have all the potential issues we have today,” said Blair Hope, CFO – Aperio.  

Instead Interactive’s solution provides all the benefits of a high availability managed services infrastructure, including utilisation of managed virtual servers and managed storage services for primary servers, managed firewall services, end-to-end management of production environment, internet access, backup solution and faster access for all sites to share services.

“We don’t need to outlay hundreds of thousands of dollars in replacement of switches and support, as the focus would be off our core site and will be supported by the best possible technology at Interactive’s data centre,” he added.

Where there is business growth, an increase in data inevitably follows – however Aperio’s existing ICT infrastructure, with its current capacity and flexibility, would limit its ability to meet the needs of its remote sites and provide the security and protection required for its customer data.

“Ultimately, we sought a solution that would make our ICT infrastructure work harder to deliver more bandwidth and increased resilience to cope with the growing demands of our business, rather than significantly investing in a completely new system or resources,” said Hope.

For the solution, Aperio turned to Interactive, who had been providing hardware maintenance services for Aperio for the past two years and had impressed Aperio with an adaptive response to its unique business needs.

Developed and managed by Interactive’s Business Solutions Group (BSG), the customised Managed Services solution means Aperio’s 13 virtual servers will be running off Interactive’s highly scalable VMware Virtual Farm, with all data replicated between its existing Chester Hill site and one of Interactive’s five Data Centres. 

To ensure maximum resiliency and security of the corporate infrastructure, Aperio also opted for Interactive’s managed storage services to provide recovery of virtual systems and critical production data, and managed firewalls across Australia and New Zealand.

Crucially, Aperio maintains full control over its servers and has the flexibility to turn up or turn down the solution to fit their business needs, with the ability to reallocate memory and the central processing unit across production virtual servers to allow for peak usage periods within the hosted environment.

“Via Interactive, we have access to the best technology and expertise that significantly improves our business efficiencies, and provides maximum system and data security, which would not have been possible with our older systems or an on-site solution,” he added.

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About Interactive

Established in 1988 and fully Australian owned, Interactive is a provider of data centre hosting, IT hardware maintenance, disaster recovery, and outsourcing services. Interactive runs five data centres located in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and provides maintenance services nationally, including New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. Interactive supports more than 1,300 of Australia’s most successful businesses with a dedicated service team of more than 200 staff. Interactive has service revenues $65 million per annum and proudly uses 100% registered GreenPower to drive all it’s Australian operations. www.interactive.com.au

For more information or to arrange an interview with Interactive and / or Aperio, please contact:

Nicola Letts

nicola.letts@che.com.au

03 8416 6770

0404 766 643