Submitter: VP Communications [View module: VP Communications ] Release Date: 23-04-2007 11 views on SourceWire View all releases submitted by VP Communications Use Tech Response Source Submit this release to: Slashdot what is this?
London April 23, 2007 ClearCube Technology, the market leader in centralised computing solutions today announced that National Car Parks (NCP), the UK's leading car park management firm, has deployed ClearCube's centralised computing solution to manage its new car parks control room and customer service centre 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 centralised computing architecture including 99.9-percent uptime. Working with ClearCube partner Bladetec, a solution was devised to host the independent systems on separate PC blades that could switch instantaneously.
NCP has unified its regional control centres into a single nationwide, state of the art control room. A critical factor of this consolidation was insuring 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 centralisation of the NCP's customer service and control centre has enabled the organisation to implement a best-fit solution for a modern command and control environment. ClearCube's powerful Sentral management 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 & sparing. Sentral can also be leveraged to support virtualised desktops as well as other vendors' blade systems.
The Croydon control centre 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. Close Circuit Television (CCTV) 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 all in real-time.
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.
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