News

Cineworld has selected Carrenza to manage the hosted services for its UK website following an six-way pitch. Carrenza UCS (Utility Computing Service) eliminates Cineworld’s requirements for hardware by using a network of dedicated servers to provide the processing power and hosting capabilities needed to run its UK website over a virtual platform. This means that their website’s capacity can scale-up rapidly to meet spikes in visitor numbers or to meet the immediate needs of marketing activity and match the extra demand for tickets to complement blockbuster openings and special promotions.

The website is a flagship for the Cineworld brand, making use of rich-media content, news, clips and trailers. The multiplex chain is now able to deliver this content to users safe in the knowledge that the site can retain all its functionality regardless of the level of traffic.

The efficiency of Carrenza’s UCS has a dramatic power consumption impact, giving a 60 per cent energy saving on a like-for-like platform. The UCS solution will also reduce Cineworlds annual total cost of ownership through not needing to own hardware. Carrenza was selected over Cable and Wireless, Titan, Telecity and Rackspace for the strength of its technical solution and competitive price point.

Carrenza worked with developers, Can Factory, on producing the supporting architecture that allows for this level of scalability to meet Cineworlds mid terms business aims. The platform and application was then put through its paces to cater for over 500,000 visitors/day, with additional headroom through scaling out the web tier, to support further traffic growth.

Vincent McGann, IT Manager, Cineworld, said, “Online ordering is a crucial revenue stream for us - downtime is simply not an option. What Carrenza has delivered with UCS is a hosting solution not only far more cost effective and scalable than other suppliers, but also ultimately gives us the assurance that the website will not fail our customers when they need it the most.

“We picked Carrenza not only because their UCS delivers an excellent level of performance, but also to help reduce the carbon footprint of our operations whilst remaining competitive. The migration to the UCS platform was handled seamlessly with no downtime whatsoever during the invisible changeover.”

Dan Sutherland, CEO of Carrenza commented, “Increasingly users will no longer tolerate downtime or server glitches on the websites they visit. It only takes a few clicks to visit a competitors’ site. Organisations like Cineworld should not have to choose between a robust, scalable hosting engine, or a cost-effective, power-saving one in order to meet their business needs. Our UCS hosting has proved once again that it is possible to have both.”
 

Carrenza has won a tender from the World Wildlife Fund to provide its Hosting. One of the criteria for selection was the environmental impact of the solutions being offered. Carrenza’s Utility Computing Service (UCS)  enables WWF to cut their data centre power consumption by around 60 per cent. This solution should also enable them to reduce their annual TCO by 15-20%.

Approximately 23 per cent of the IT industry’s global carbon dioxide emissions are generated by the power needed to run and cool servers in data centres (Source: Gartner, September 2007). Carrenza’s UCS is a true enterprise solution and has been designed to help businesses reduce their environmental impact by making more efficient use of virtual servers. Using UCS, four or more virtual servers can use the same hardware footprint as one traditional server. This allows the reduction of much of the switching and network infrastructure necessitated by duplicate networks running side-by-side in Co-location.

“Rising energy costs, reduced space and a desire to be greener are all factors driving the virtual data centre. We’re seeing more and more CIOs wanting to eliminate the pain and the hassle of managing the back end and this is where UCS really adds value,” said Dan Sutherland, CEO, Carrenza. “UCS provides businesses with a service run by highly-trained engineers and it eliminates the need to purchase new hardware every couple of years as a business’ processing power requirements grow.”

Carrenza’s UCS uses dedicated networked virtual servers to provide businesses with the servers, service levels and resources they require to power their organisation without them needing to buy or manage a hardware platform. It has been designed to enable companies with significant processing and hosting requirements, such as design agencies, large e-commerce outfits and enterprises, to tap into the benefits of utility computing.

Carrenza UCS is developed to fit the unique needs of each individual client. Carrenza’s consulting team work with the client to shape the technical solution and the commercial model for the service and then to deploy the required technology. Once installed Carrenza manages the hardware, the support, the hosting, the internet connectivity, the data centre, and the security to ensure a robust platform that guarantees business-critical operations and is fully scaleable.

“A lot of large companies’ data centres have grown organically over time in line with their day-to-day needs. This often results in a jumble of technologies and inefficiencies that need  more manpower, more electricity and even more physical space to resolve them. Our UCS product has been designed to make it as easy as possible for firms to meet these challenges head on. Make no mistake, this is the future of enterprise hosting,” added Sutherland.

UCS is a bespoke service; Carrenza uses a range of hardware to ensure it meets the needs of its customers businesses with UCS. The company offers virtual machines with between one and eight cores using AMD or Intel x86 64Bit processors. Each virtual machine (VM) currently runs between 2GB – 16GB of RAM on either Xen or VMWare virtual platforms with virtualisation based on Microsoft Server 2008 arriving shortly

The use of virtual machines means that each organisation’s processing power is run by servers dedicated to them, eliminating the risk of reduced performance associated with co-location hosting methods. Carrenza has invested significantly in its data centres and infrastructure to ensure that customer data is secure and comprehensively robust. Each location has 24 hour on site security and full disaster recovery capabilities.
 

Digital Design Day (D3)  - London Design Festival’s inaugural day-long digital programme from Carrenza – was a huge success. Industry professionals, design students and members of the public came down to the free Digital Design Day at the Southbank Centre on 17th September 2008. They enjoyed a varied and interactive day exploring and celebrating all aspects of digital design – with showcases and seminars from luminaries and genuine innovators across the digital design, CAD, CGI, 3D, sound and visualisation industries.  

The day’s highlights included:
• Apple demonstrate new features of Leopard OSX designed for digital creativity
• Cut&Paste live 15 minute head-to-head design battles throughout the day
• Portfolio clinic a-buzz with fresh new talent receiving industry feedback
• iDesign Conference from Dynamo London

Top UK digital design talent revealed at Y Design Award Winners Party – sponsored by CarrenzaThe Y Design Awards 2008 winners were announced at an invite-only party attended by 250 people at the Royal Festival Hall on Wednesday, 17th September 2008.
Y Design Awards were immensely popular with over 190 submissions from the UK's leading agencies.The scheme sponsors and partners in 2008 included: 3D World Magazine, London Design Festival, Apple, dynamo London and Kirin Beer.The 2008 winners can be found at the Y Design Awards website – www.ydesignawards.com 
 

The 2008 London Design Festival is launching this morning at a press conference at London's South Bank Centre. This is the sixth Festival, and again it is planned to be bigger and better then ever. In 2007 nearly 400000 people attended over 220 events across London, with the Festival Hub at the Festival Hall one of the highlights. Once again the Festival is basing itself on the South Bank with highlights including the Carrenza sponsored Y Design awards and the inaugural D3 - The Digital Design Day.  

A full program of events will be available on the LDF website which again this year is being hosted by Carrenza. 

We knew something had to be done to raise cash for the 2008 Sport Relief campaign, but we are not really your jogging in the rain sort of team so we had to look for a way of doing sport and staying warm dry and entertained.

Elaine who is in charge of this sort of clever idea suggested mounting a Wii sports challenge -  go-karts and wrestling were discarded – so a call to our friends at Nintendo and we had blagged the use of a swanky Wii Kiosk. More help from our Landlord,  who lent us the foyer and from the team at BD NTWK who look after Nintendo’s Direct Marketing  and we had a challenge. Have fun and raise money for Sport Relief all in without leaving the building!

It was a huge success, people came up with all manner of excuses for not being at their desks working hard, lunchbreaks stretched and we managed to raise over £600 and pulled muscles with over enthusiastic Wii boxing. 

Sport Relief is a brilliant cause and a great way to raise money, we will be back next time round, but in the mean time you can always slip them a tenner or whatever you can manage, just pop over to http://donate.sportrelief.com with you card ready.

Carrenza has today been awarded Microsoft Gold Partner Status in recognition of our expertise in building and operating advanced systems.

Designed for technology partners specialising in high-availability, complex infrastructure solutions. Areas of specialisation for this competency are Active Directory Management, Exchange Migration and Deployment, Hosting, Systems Management and Storage Solutions.

We are delighted to have won this recognition, Our MS team have worked very hard with clients to deliver some challenging projects and we are really pleased that that work has been recognized.