The NSW Centre for Volunteering Reaps Huge Productivity Rewards Thanks to Technology Donation

The NSW Centre for Volunteering is speeding up its operations courtesy of a technology donation from EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) in partnership with EMC distributor Ingram Micro and partner Always Up IT.

The Centre for Volunteering aims to support, educate and inform the state’s 2.5 million volunteers and those who engage them. One of their primary goals is to increase the understanding among volunteers, charities and businesses that volunteering is just as structured and just as necessary as paid employment.

Following the implementation last year – which began with Always Up IT optimising the Centre for Volunteering’s bandwidth to ensure applications and data could be moved quickly and consistently – the Centre for Volunteering has seen dramatically faster application speeds. Remote connections for instance, which are particularly important for the staff who work remotely, have seen a 200 per cent increase in speed. Programs that receive very regular use such as Microsoft Word and Outlook open up to 400 per cent faster.

As well as boosting productivity among the existing team of staff and volunteers, the technology is forming the basis of a range of initiatives, including a NSW-wide database of volunteers, which the organisation hopes to become the platform for a national database. Currently, there is no such system and a list of available volunteers has to be re-created every time it is needed, which is a drain on staff and volunteer time at the Centre.

The technology is also expected to support an upgrade of The Centre for Volunteering’s training capabilities. Through its partnership with Clubs NSW, the Centre can consider stepping up its training courses that are delivered through the systems available in individual clubs.

The technology provided to The NSW Centre for Volunteering was an EMC VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, comprising two Cisco Unified Computing System C200 M2 servers, VMware vSphere server virtualisation, EMC Unisphere® storage management and an EMC VNXe® 3100 storage system. Always Up IT architected and installed the infrastructure in the first half of 2013, in addition to providing training to existing staff.

The system was an upgrade from Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2011 running on Dell hardware with SCSI storage drives. With improvements in both speed and capacity, The Centre is now in a much better position to expand into new areas.

Customer Quote:

Lynne Dalton, Chief Executive Officer, NSW Centre for Volunteering

“The EMC VSPEX Proven Infrastructure deployed by Ingram Micro and Always Up IT has already considerably improved our ability to service volunteers and volunteer-engaging organisations in New South Wales. Volunteering is not charity. It’s work and should be seen that way. We see the system being vital to our program of work in the future.”

David Fisher Dobbin, Development Manager, The NSW Centre for Volunteering

“The government wants to find out more about volunteers in Australia. This includes who is volunteering, what tasks they are performing, where they live and where they participate in volunteering, how old they are and what skills they have. At the moment, every time there is an emergency, we need to gather all that information again.

“If we can use the infrastructure to build a system that allows us to know at any time how many volunteers are available, there has to be a benefit to the community when there are extreme weather events or threats.”

Partner Quote:

Raja Pradeep, Director, Always Up IT

“It has been a delight to provide such a worthwhile organisation with the technology to not only improve their current offering, but also to realise their vision for the next stage of volunteer management and training.”

EMC Executive Quotes:

Alister Dias, Vice President and Managing Director, EMC Australia & New Zealand

“It is an honour to know that this technology is supporting the community in such an integral way. If the centre can develop a NSW wide volunteering database, the benefits would be reaped every time there is an urgent need for rapid deployment of volunteers. It would also allow the centre to keep the volunteer community engaged and active. It has been a pleasure to work with Ingram Micro and Always Up IT to help deliver these capabilities to The NSW Centre of Volunteering.”

Additional Resources:

• Read more about EMC’s VSPEX proven architecture here: http://www.emc.com/vspex
• Connect with EMC ANZ via Twitter, LinkedIn, blog

About EMC
EMC Corporation is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyse their most valuable asset – information – in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way. Additional information about EMC can be found at www.emc.com.

# # #

EMC is a registered trademark of EMC Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks used are the property of their respective owners.