And the winners are..

They encompass the achievements of end-users, channel partners and vendors alike, and in the case of the end-user category awards were also made to the supplier who nominated the winning organisation. A judging panel validated all the entries and approved those that went forward to the voting process.

END-USER AWARDS

Green Datacenter Project of the Year

Sponsored by

Winner: BelleVue Datacentre supported by Sudlows
Runner-up: LHC Docklands Data Centre supported by Telstra Global

Located on a brown-field site, the BelleVue Data Centre building, at first, was set to become an office development but, during the construction phase was beefed up to enable it to be used as a Data Centre site.

This combination, whilst first appearing too small a footprint, simply required some inventive space planning to fulfil the company’s IT requirement for hosting and cloud based service provision. In fact, once designed the facility was capable of punching far above its weight in terms of both capacity and resilience, given its modest 400sqm footprint.

Private Sector Cloud Project of the Year

Sponsored by

Winner: Garwyn Group supported by EBC Group
Runner-up: Lush Fresh Handmade Cosmetics supported by Memset

For EBC Group, implementing and installing a Cloud solution without causing any disruption to Garwyn’s workflow was imperative. Understanding that downtime could seriously harm their business proceedings, led EBC Group to conduct an extensive analysis of their working routine to establish and prepare their implementation for the network roll out.

Operating outside of Garwyn’s working hours allowed EBC Group to make major changes to their systems without their employees noticing any changes to the usual routine.
Private Sector Datacenter Project of the Year

Winner: Aimes Grid Services supported by Keysource
Runner-up: BelleVue Datacentre supported by Sudlows

Liverpool based AIMES has undergone considerable growth in recent years and is working with an increasing number of customers in the northwest. As a result of this rapid expansion the company outgrew its existing data centre and needed to develop a resilient and highly energy efficient facility that was capable of being flexibly scaled to meet both AIMES’ and its clients immediate and future business needs.

AIMES commitment to maximising environmental and commercial sustainability narrowed the outline solution to utilising an existing building in an existing secure environment in order to limit both costs and the embedded carbon footprint of the new facility.

Public Sector Cloud Project of the Year

Sponsored by

Winner: G-Cloud Programme supported by Skyscape
Runner-up: Energy Savings Trust supported by CohesiveFT

The G-Cloud Programme was launched in 2011 as a key element of the UK Government’s ICT strategy. The UK public sector has many challenges to contend
with, including budget constraints, the
use of legacy technology, skills shortages, high costs and long term contracts to
name but a few. Added to which, the purchasing and supplier frameworks previously in place were notoriously inflexible – s
omething that has been recognised by the Government IT
Strategy and which the G-Cloud Programme has set out to re-address.
Public Sector Datacenter Project of the Year

Winner: Partick Housing Association supported by
Castle Computer Services
Runner-up: NHS Airedale Bradford & Leeds supported by
Schneider APC

Partick Housing Association (PHA) is a charitable industrial and provident society and a registered social landlord which manages and rents out almost 1,700 flats and delivers a factoring service to over 2,000 customers across the west of Glasgow.

Castle worked closely with PHA throughout the transition from their traditional on-premise infrastructure into the Castle Cloud, ensuring a seamless migration with no negative impact for users. PHA put their faith in Castle to deliver the ultimate solution for their organisation, resulting in their IT Manager having more time to focus on core priorities without distraction.

CHANNEL AWARDS

Reseller of the Year

Sponsored by

Winner: S3
Runner up: Britannic Technologies

Over the last 25 years S3 has become the UK’s leading Big Data and Virtualisation Infrastructure Specialist. Delivering a consultative led engagement, whilst focusing on vertical market segments. S3 has an extensive knowledge of end user workflows as well as industry solutions. S3 strives to be technically independent and positioned amongst our customer base as both thought leader and trusted advisor.

Value Added Distributor of the Year

Sponsored by

Winner: Source
Runner up: Avnet Technology Solutions

Not a traditional IT distributor SOURCE is a data centre, network and Internet service provider that delivers its services to and through the channel allowing IT Resellers, MSPs, ISPs etc. the confidence of
100% availability and giving their end
users a superior level of service supported with direct peer Tier 1 data centre access.
Service/Hosting Provider of the Year

Sponsored by

Winner: UKFast
Runner-up: ServerSpace

Having grown with no outside funding from a two-man in 1999, UKFast is now turning over more than £20m and is the UK’s largest privately-owned hosting and colocation firm, with four wholly-owned data centres in its portfolio. With a focus on service at its heart from the offset, UKFast has the client in mind in every step it takes. In the past twelve months UKFast has opened three facilities, MaNOC 5,6&7, including Manchester’s most powerful data centre complex, the aptly named DCPlex.

TECHNOLOGY AWARDS

Datacenter Appliance of the Year

Winner: Actifio
Runner-up: Fluke Networks - Visual TruView

Actifio is a radically simple copy data management company. As the transformation of datacenters to virtualized and Cloud architectures evolved in 2009, Founder Ash Ashutosh observed how little storage technology had evolved to keep up with new business requirements. Roughly two-thirds of storage capacity was being used to store copies of data for business continuity, disaster recovery, test and development, analysis, and archiving. Organizations were spending more money to manage the copies of their data than their original data. Actifio’s Copy Data Storage Solutions change the rules of data management in a world where copies have become the driver of the storage explosion.

Datacenter Hardware Product of the Year

Winner: X-IO Intelligent Storage Element (ISE)
Runner-up: Dell PowerEdge R820

X-IO’s “ISE” technology breaks some of the key myths of storage by providing a true “zero-touch” architecture that for the first time brings the concept of a 7 year duty cycle to Enterprise storage. The ISE is an easy to use, high performance, scale-out, fibre-channel storage system leveraging the industry’s highest-grade SAS HDDs. ISE storage provides enterprise-class reliability with self-healing capabilities. ISE storage systems are an excellent solution to manage data centre applications including Microsoft SQL Server, Hyper-V, SharePoint, Exchange, Oracle, VMware vSphere, Citrix XenServer or other database and virtualisation solutions.

Datacenter Management Product of the Year

Winner: Racktivity DCPM (Data Centre Power Management System)
Runner-up: NDSL Group Cellwatch Battery Monitoring

Racktivity’s DCPM (Data Centre Power Management System) software is a mission-critical data centre management software designed to address the specific power (both on IT and facility level) and environmental aspects of the data centre infrastructure. By providing the data centre with the most accurate and detailed metrics they are able to maximize productivity, availability and efficiency, all through the DCPM software suite.

Datacenter Power & Cooling Product of the Year
Winner: EXCOOL Data Centre Cooling Unit
Runner-up: Enlogic Energy Series PDU

Excool is a fully developed and purpose designed data centre cooling product which in many cases is able to be used without need for mechanical cooling. The system uses outdoor air indirectly through a specially designed series of heat exchangers enabling cooling to take place without outdoor air entering the data hall, therefore air pollution hazards such as smoke and salt aerosols are kept out of the building.
With the use of specially designed adiabatic sprays the Excool product can maintain data centre internal temperatures of 24oC with ambients in excess of 35oC.

Datacenter Storage Software Product of the Year

Sponsored by

Winner: Tarmin GridBank Data Management Platform
Runner-up: StarWind iSCSI SAN and NAS

The GridBank family of products address the key challenges faced by organizations seeking to better manage their existing mixed infrastructures or build their own modern multi-site, petabyte scale, geographically distributed data repositories. GridBank provides highly available, application aware access to information for users in pursuit of improved business operational efficiencies, strategic new undertakings, proactive responses to increased compliance mandates and analytic insight requirements.
Datacenter Networking Product of the Year
Winner: Emulex LightPulse® LPe16000B-series
Runner-up: Brocade VDX Switch family with VCS Fabric Technology

The Emulex LightPulse® LPe16000B-series 16Gb Fibre Channel (16GFC) Host Bus Adapter (HBA) is the company’s latest iteration of its highly-regarded LightPulse product line. With support for PCI Express (PCIe) 3.0, the LPe16000B 16GFC HBA provides market-leading I/O operations per second (IOPS) performance, while also offering extremely fast response times and a fourfold improvement on IOPS performance per watt.

With support for more than 1.2 million IOPS1 on a single port, it is ideally suited for FC connectivity to the latest generation of solid state disk (SSD) arrays making their way into the mainstream marketplace, as well as new multi-core processors and virtualised mission-critical applications.

Datacenter Software Product of the Year

Winner: arvato Systems, Streamworks
Runner-up: OnApp Cloud v3.0

Streamworks is workload automation software designed by data centre operation specialists to automate IT processes beyond traditional job scheduling for customers of any size.

At its core, Streamworks takes advantage of modern technologies with a proven track record of performance and reliability. The software fully supports multi-tenancy with comprehensive reporting and compliance audit capabilities.

Streamworks architecture and usability has been designed to offer
the highest scalability and automation, as well as the lowest operational cost. As a result our customers achieve unparalleled efficiencies and operational quality while keeping the cost and operational efforts very low.

Datacenter Facility Product of the Year

Winner: Corning Cable Systems Pretium EDGE®
Runner-up: Automation NV Green Modular DC Solutions

The Corning Pretium EDGE is an optical fibre-rich cabling infrastructure solution for datacentres. It consists of optical trunks, harnesses, modules, housings and jumpers and incorporates Corning ClearCurve® optical fibre as standard. This innovative solution addresses the concerns of datacentre owners and operators, helping them increase revenue, reduce costs and minimise risk.
SSD/Flash Product of the Year

Sponsored by

Winner: X-IO Hyper-ISE

Runner-up: WHIPTAIL INVICTA all Flash storage array

X-IO’s Hyper-ISE fuses Solid State Flash Drives (SSD) and Hard Disk Drives (HDD) as a single pool of storage, creating the ideal balance of price, performance, and capacity. Hyper-ISE uses patented Continuous Adaptive Data Placement (CADP) software to analyse the behaviour of application I/O and place hotspot data onto SSD in real time if measurable performance gains will be achieved. If not, data is kept on lower-cost HDD, ensuring SSDs are fully optimised and available for performance-driven data. By creating the perfect partnership between SSD and HDD, it can match or even outperform all-flash systems at 25% of the cost.

Datacentre Energy & Efficiency Product of the Year

Sponsored by the

Winner: NextiraOne
Runner-up: Racktivity EnergySwitch PDU

NextiraOne consults, designs, deploys and manages every aspect of the Data Centre, creating Data Centres for the technology-centric businesses of tomorrow. Its experts work closely with its customers’ teams, auditing their estate and data requirements and looking into the heart of their working practices and user demands. NextiraOne then creates the ideal, flexible mix of solutions and services providing a Data Centre that supports, enables and transforms business.

DCS Industry Award

Winner: Interxion

Each year the organiser Angel Business Communications like to recognise a significant contribution to or outstanding achievement in the industry – this award is not voted for by the readers of the publications but based on the publisher’s and editorial staff’s opinions.

Interxion wins the 2013 award for its achievements in providing carrier neutral datacentres, independent of any network, hardware or software vendor. With a portfolio of datacentres in 11 countries across Europe, Interxion can offer a choice of 450 carriers and 18 internet exchanges. Interxion offers an Industry leading service, designed around its customers’ needs and at the same time leading the way in design, build, and operation maintenance, resulting in constant sustainable solutions with innovation, reducing their carbon footprint.

For more pictures and information about the 2013 DCS Awards visit www.dcsawards.com