ESB is a leading Irish utility focused on providing excellent customer service and maintaining its financial strength. ESB have a regulated asset base of approximately €9 billion with 43% of electricity generation capacity in the all-island market. ESB currently supply electricity to approximately 1.4 million customers throughout the island of Ireland. ESB Group employs approximately 7,000 people.
The ESB’s mission is to bring sustainable and competitive energy solutions to all customers and the company’s vision is to be Ireland’s foremost energy company competing successfully in the all-island market. The ESB has implemented a cloud management platform (CMP) to improve the way they run their business.
“In order to remain successful, we needed to improve the way we deliver new services to our customers,” explains Dermot Mangan, Infrastructure Services Manager at ESB. “Due to the volume of workloads we run, leveraging virtual machines, databases, applications, cloud and security, we wanted to use digital and cloud technologies in a secure and cost-efficient manner.”
As a technology partner to ESB, Triangle helped the ESB to grow to a large virtualised environment running key applications which supported 450 production applications through 2300 VMs, 245 hosts and 60 clusters. Following on the success of this project, the ESB in conjunction with Triangle identified the requirement for a cloud management platform (CMP) to optimise and manage its cloud infrastructure for cost, security and operations.
In order to manage costs associated with public cloud, ESB chose to run their workloads on premise in a private cloud initially. Then, during peak demand, they could utilize the public cloud for extra capacity. Deploying a hybrid IT strategy, managed with a best in-class CMP, helps the ESB provide more services in a more cost-efficient way.
The project spans many different groups of the organisation: SAP, Network, Security, Linux, Storage, Microsoft and Cloud. The ESB stated a strategy of cloud first when suitable with Triangle establishing VMWare Cloud technologies as the platform of choice in an environment which had previously been heavily embedded with Microsoft.
Triangle worked closely with the ESB and delivered a cloud management platform by way of installation and configuration of the management and automation of the software purchased, designed to VMware best practice.
“Managing this type of hybrid environment required a new set of management and deployment tools as well as a cross-functional team of skilled resources to enable a move towards a digital era, allowing us to develop our business services for our customers,” concludes Dermot. “Triangle delivered on all our objectives and we have the platform that provides cost savings through increased visibility on the estate that the VMware vRealize Suite of products facilitates. It is a robust, scalable and agile platform giving us the ability to control a complex and fast-changing environment.”
