• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

National Car Parks Selects ClearCube Technology to Avoid Critical Downtime and Keep Its Facilities Fully Operational

Posted on: Monday, 23 April 2007, 09:00 CDT

ClearCube Technology, the market leader in centralized computing solutions, today announced that National Car Parks (NCP), the UK's leading car park management firm, has deployed a solution from ClearCube to manage its new car park control room and customer service center in Croydon, UK. With ClearCube's technology, this facility, which will manage up to 600 car parking sites across the UK, will benefit from the security, high availability and operational benefits of a centralized computing architecture, including 99.9 percent uptime. Working with ClearCube partner Bladetec, NCP devised a solution to host the independent systems on separate PC blades that can switch instantaneously.

NCP has unified its regional control centers into a single nationwide, state-of-the-art control room. A critical factor of this consolidation was ensuring the uptime of the control room in order for NCP to continue to deliver the best customer service for parking in the country. Now five separate and redundant IT infrastructure systems are provisioned to each control room operator. In the event of a software or hardware failure, the position is put back to full use within five minutes.

The centralization of NCP's customer service and control center has enabled the organization to implement a best-fit solution for a modern command and control environment. ClearCube's powerful Sentral(TM) management software forms the core of the NCP solution. The software provides NCP IT administrators with visibility and control of local and remote computing deployments. In addition to simplifying deployment management, the software delivers proven security, disaster recovery and cost-reduction benefits. Sentral offers IT administrators unique capabilities like dynamic resource allocation, virtual desktop management, active health monitoring and PC blade switching and sparing. Sentral can also be leveraged to support virtualized desktops, as well as other vendors' blade systems.

"Before the Croydon Operations Center, NCP operated seven satellite centers around the UK to control its car parks," commented Neil Robson, technology director at NCP. "The transition to a centralized environment has provided NCP with a highly adaptable computing solution that gives us 100 percent systems availability and significantly simplifies IT management. Most importantly, the architecture allows NCP to exceed our already-tight goals for superior customer service."

"IT failures can disrupt the level of service provided by customer-facing organizations, particularly in our competitive industry," continued Robson. "NCP's customers expect the highest level of service, so any IT failure for us is totally unacceptable. Our move to a centralized blade solution means that in the event of any hardware or software failures, operators simply switch to spare PC blades with a few clicks in Sentral and continue operations. This ability has really raised the bar for NCP's world-class customer service."

The Croydon Operations Center hosts 16 controllers who are able to manage all of NCP's car parks in the UK, overseeing security, payment and customer services operations from one contact point. Closed-circuit television at each car park is relayed back to secure operations, while the payments system is linked to all ticket barriers and payment machines. The high-integration of all car park operations allows NCP operators to connect directly to any barrier in any car park with video and voice-feeds to discuss customer inquiries in real-time. Operators can query payments and resolve customer incidents in seconds.

"NCP is another example of a forward-thinking organization looking to benefit from new technology to drive down operational costs and increase their levels of customer satisfaction," said John Kingdon, managing director of Bladetec. "ClearCube's centralized computing technology is unique in allowing us to use our design expertise to build the solution required by NCP to improve their business."

"This is another world-class example of a leading enterprise adopting our centralized computing platform to gain unparalleled reliability, security and flexibility," said Bruce Cohen, president and CEO of ClearCube. "With our technology, NCP has created an operations center that is able to deliver exemplary customer service."

NCP is the highest profile name in parking and traffic management in the UK. With more than 800 car parks, NCP provides a range of services including car park management, airport parking and consultancy for the design, build and maintenance of car parks.

About ClearCube

ClearCube is the market leader in centralized computing solutions that integrate blades, access devices and client management software to give organizations full control over end-user computing. ClearCube's blades house the latest PC components including Intel(R) Core(TM) 2 Duo, Xeon(R) and Pentium(R) 4 processors with Hyper-Threading. Organizations deploying ClearCube gain 99.9 percent uptime, hardened security and extra workspace while reducing support costs by more than 40 percent. For more information, visit www.clearcube.com.

 Contacts: Kala Ranganathan ClearCube Technology 512.652.3500 Contact via http://www.marketwire.com/mw/emailprcntct?id=7926E098D5D6EE88  Keith Giannini/Allison Bedard Schwartz Communications 781.684.0770 Contact via http://www.marketwire.com/mw/emailprcntct?id=7F497E36495140C1  

SOURCE: ClearCube Technology

Source: MARKET WIRE

More News in this Category