Pictured from left:  Joe Hanley, IT Manager, Wellman International, Edel Creely, Managing Director, and John Casey, Sales Director, Trilogy Technologies .

WELLMAN INTERNATIONAL

Virtualised solution helps Wellman reduce its carbon footprint

Wellman International Limited is Europe's largest producer of high quality polyester staple fibres.  Based near Kells in Co. Meath, Wellman has pioneered the use of recycled raw materials since the plant was founded in the early 1970s.  The company employs over 270 people at its manufacturing facility. The company's recycling plants, located in France and The Netherlands, process over 1.6 billion post-consumer PET bottles annually.

Wellman has implemented a new information technology infrastructure and disaster recovery solution in a virtual environment with the aim of improving the company's mission critical systems resilience and availability while at the same time reducing its carbon footprint.

"We needed to address the problems posed by an ageing and increasingly troublesome hardware infrastructure," explains Joe Hanley, I.T. Manager at Wellman International.  "In addition, we wanted to strengthen our mission critical systems resilience and availability. It was also important that we could reduce our carbon footprint by minimizing our power consumption, cooling requirements and dependence on large UPS's."

Following a detailed tendering process Trilogy Technologies was selected as the preferred solution provider for Wellman International. Trilogy implemented a fully redundant virtual private cloud infrastructure based on IBM Servers, Storage and Backup and built the Infrastructure in VMware VSphere technology.

Additional IBM storage is configured on a virtual platform and located in a separate comms room on the Wellman campus. The SAN's are connected via Fibre backbone using the backup and replication features of Veeam Software and provide Wellman with continuous uptime while also addressing business continuity and disaster recovery.

The complete solution is underpinned by a Trilogy Managed Service which includes system and application monitoring, management and reporting via the Trilogy 'edge/point' portal.

"We now have real time online replication with regard to our systems and this allows us to respond quickly in the event of any failure or disaster. If our systems go down, I have the security of knowing that our virtual environment will allow users experience the minimum of disruption", adds Joe.  "We were impressed by Trilogy Technologies' spread of technological expertise and track record.  We are very happy with the way the project has gone and we have found Trilogy to be very professional in terms of project management, planning, implementation and support."

"The solution eliminates the risk and cost associated with outdated hardware and improves our disaster recovery and high availability options," concludes Joe.  "It allows us look into the possibility of cloud computing on a greater scale and how it can further enhance our service delivery to the business."