VMware gives Carisbrooke Shipping 'extra peace of mind' for sailing the seas
Daniel Lewandowski, IT manager at Carisbrooke Shipping, explains how VMware vCloud Air has benefited the firm
Based on the Isle of Wight - known as the heart and soul of UK sailing - Carisbrooke Shipping has been operating since the 1960s and now represents one of the largest firms in the UK shipping sector.
The company has over 100 employees, spread across the UK, Germany and Holland, but despite its success, Carisbrooke Shipping became aware that it needed to update its IT infrastructure to remain competitive.
"It became obvious that we needed to change our approach," Daniel Lewandowski, IT manager at Carisbrooke Shipping, explained. "And that's when we came across VMware and its virtualisation technology."
Lewandowski described how it was a simple decision for Carisbrooke Shipping to select VMware when the firm wanted to virtualise its IT systems.
"Back in 2008 VMware was a market leader in virtualisation, offering excellent performance for an affordable price, so from that perspective, it was a fairly easy choice for us," he said.
However, by 2013, Carisbrooke Shipping decided it was time to once again re-examine its IT infrastructure in order to maintain its position in the shipping industry.
"Five years later, the shipping industry had changed. Rising fuel costs and high competition had an impact on many shipping businesses. We realised that in order to stay competitive, we needed to find new ways to improve the way we operate," Lewandowski explained.
The firm's remote offices were the first to come under the spotlight.
"We decided to focus on our remote offices and the way they exchanged information with our headquarters," he said. "We thought that if we centralised our IT infrastructure and migrated some of the IT systems to our UK office, we would be able to minimise the cost of IT management as well hardware."
That meant Lewandowski was on the search for a cloud-based solution that would fit the changing needs of Carisbrooke Shipping.
"We began looking for a solution that would go beyond the limitations of our physical infrastructure, something which would allow us to expand without the burden of high cost associated with servers and data centres," Lewandowski explained. "Cloud solutions seemed like a perfect fit."
Carisbrooke Shipping therefore examined a number of cloud providers, but soon decided the best solution was to stick with VMware but upgrade to its vCloud Air platform and benefit from the improved performance.
"We quickly realised there weren't many companies offering the same level of integration and control as VMware vCloud Air. With vCloud Air, we were able to expand our network on demand, which gave us an amazing level of flexibility and control," he said.
For Carisbrooke Shipping, it's vastly improved how the firm goes about its business.
"It's how we can provision, pretty much instantly, new server configuration settings and new storage, which has completely changed the way we think about our IT infrastructure," Lewandowski explained. "It gives us that extra peace of mind."
