NextiraOne to design Second Data Centre for growing Gazprom Marketing & Trading business needs

Lichfield, 18 July 2013 – Gazprom Marketing & Trading Ltd (GM&T), part of OAO Gazprom, one of the world’s largest gas and energy organisations, has selected NextiraOne to design, implement and support its new Data Centre (DC2) facility located in Manchester.

This new facility has been implemented as a dedicated suite within a third party Data Centre hosting facility and the solution includes all key Data Centre and infrastructure elements.  It is closely aligned with GM&T’s first Data Centre based in London, which was also designed, deployed and supported by NextiraOne. Together the two Data Centres provide critical Disaster Recovery and back-up systems and services for GM&T’s global operations.

The new Data Centre has been designed using NextiraOne’s extensive Data Centre and project management expertise. It provides GM&T with a secure, scalable platform to allow continued growth across its markets and the Disaster Recovery environment to ensure business continuity in a sensitive real-time trading environment.

Rob Pringle, Director of Global IT at GM&T said: “Continuity of our business operations is absolutely essential. The energy markets are open 24 hours a day, 365 days per year. Real-time information, rapid trading responses and many critical business processes around the globe depend on our Data Centre facilities and our IT platforms working non-stop and reliably. As our business has grown, NextiraOne has been a trusted partner supporting us with our growth challenges across international markets. Our second Data Centre gives us the added redundancy and back-up we need to support our business and will also be the new home for our production energy retail systems. NextiraOne has assisted us throughout the process from evaluation to implementation and ongoing support.”

GM&T is the London-based marketing and trading arm of the Gazprom group and has divisions that handle energy trading, and energy retail to end consumers. GM&T has grown rapidly – the company’s primary Gas and Power trading and retail systems have grown significantly over the past three years and it now has a major share of the industrial and commercial gas market, accounting for more than 10% by volume of the entire UK market.

NextiraOne provides a range of end-to-end services to GM&T, including design for its two Data Centres, its Local Area Network (LAN) and for Network & Web Security infrastructure across the globe, plus all equipment provision for these projects. The company also provides Project Management and implementation services for the Data Centres and other key communications projects and the design, provision and implementation services for network cabling at Data Centres. NextiraOne is also GM&T’s maintenance partner, providing full break-fix services for the Cisco network infrastructure and the two GM&T Data Centres.

NextiraOne has worked with GM&T since 2008, beginning with a project to provide IT solutions for the company’s original Kingston site. Since then NextiraOne has been a trusted partner, supporting GM&T’s expansion with additional evolving services. When GM&T moved to prestigious headquarters in Central London in 2011, NextiraOne was on hand to deliver a new local area network (LAN) for the office along with the initial Data Centre project (DC1).  Its second Data Centre (DC2) in Manchester was commissioned earlier this year and was also designed and implemented by NextiraOne.

“From an IT perspective, the business demands associated with a commodity trading environment and general requirements have changed significantly, calling for increased levels of applications availability, broader geographical coverage and increased resilience in the underlying IT architecture,” said Steven Skakel, Managing Director UK & Ireland for NextiraOne. “We understand how critical this is and work alongside GM&T to ensure its Data Centre and IT platforms can support these business imperatives at all times.”

NextiraOne provides a wide range of Data Centre and private Cloud services related to Data Centre transformation and virtualisation, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery solutions. These secure, scalable and cost-effective solutions lead to significantly higher productivity and increased efficiency for IT departments.