Proact Supplies New Data Centre to Swedish Sawmill Group Vida

VIDA AB, a Sweden’s privately-owned sawmill group, employing around 900 staff at 17 production plants, has chosen Proact IT Group AB to supply its IT infrastructure.

The company is also upgrading its data centre and replacing most of its hardware.

VIDA has centralised its IT operations at a data centre serving collective group functions and production facilities all over southern Sweden. A range of business-critical applications are run here, including systems for timber purchasing and sawmill production management.

VIDA has now selected a solution from Proact which is based on the FlexPod reference architecture, using equipment such as Cisco UCS blade servers and NetApp storage systems, including disk-based backup. All storage will be mirrored to a secondary data centre, thereby also giving the company stronger disaster protection than it used to have.

“We like both the performance and the security we get as part of the FlexPod concept, with support from Proact. This is also a cost-effective solution as we are now making a complete switch to a modern, virtualised infrastructure,” says Magnus Linnér, head of IT, VIDA.

FlexPod is a reference architecture for data centres in which all components are tested and optimised in advance so that they all work together. This also means that Proact, in its capacity as a supplier, can accept overall responsibility for support even though the equipment is being supplied by a number of manufacturers.

“VIDA is the latest in a long line of customers who have discovered the advantages of FlexPod. Selecting a reference architecture instead of building a data centre using ‘loose’ components will give them a system which is fine-tuned and ready to get up and running right from the outset,” says Dan Mårtensson, regional manager, Proact.