Tug Company Goes Full Steam with Cloud Computing
Venyu, a company in business continuity, cloud-based virtualization, and battle-tested data recovery, announced that E.N. BISSO has expanded its VenyuCloud, cloud computing and virtualization platform.
E.N. BISSO, a provider of harbor and tug towing services for the Gulf Coast, is improving operations with flexible cloud hosting, improved network availability and enhanced IT support, Venyu said.
E.N. BISSO supported its fleet of 15 vessels for docking and undocking of oceangoing vessels and barge combination units via a small data center in its main location, linked to a small branch office. However, maintaining the IT infrastructure became more than a full-time job, pulling staff away from implementing more strategic maritime applications and achieving their virtualization goal.
"We were supporting the business with just one corporate facility linked to a satellite location. This included a few physical servers connected to a Network Access Storage (NAS) device with Peer Sync for data replication," noted Michael Collins, Network Administrator, E.N. BISSO. "With a goal of becoming 100 percent virtualized, it was clear the internal system would fall short in meeting our needs."
Exacerbating the situation was the company's Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) needs. ILM required continual hardware and software maintenance, device upgrades and compliance adherence. E.N. BISSO understood a plausible solution for freeing time from perpetual ILM was cloud-based IT services.
Venyu said it helped the company move half of their physical servers in a co-location environment, with virtual machines running in the cloud -- utilizing VMware cloud and vCloud Director to manage services from any Internet connection. The flexible cloud-based offering ensured the company could still virtualize physical devices, while freeing staff to focus on more business-critical concerns. In addition, E.N. BISSO selected Venyu's disaster recovery (DR) service ensuring the replication and backup of files.
