Proving the Concept with Ingram Micro

Based in Auckland's North Shore City, Pronet delivers high value, hi-tech hardware and services to its clients coupled with an extensive knowledge of Data Centre and network solutions. Part of Pronet's R&D programme has been to host a 15 year project for one of its clients, to further Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology.

Described by Pronet as; "taking a quantum leap into RFID application", the project team is in the final stages preparing to commercialise its development. This has required testing the first version of the product in a controlled environment outside of Pronet's development lab. It needed to be a highly secure testing space and able to expand its capability to provide comparable tests as the various beta stages of the product were developed.

"We needed a large server deployment that had more capability than what we had available at the time in-house for testing," explains Pronet's Colin Kinross, "we needed to confirm the optimum sort of driving power that was going to be needed to run the solution."

Ingram Micro's Discovery Centre was able to be set up to exactly the specifications Pronet needed as well as putting any security and confidentiality concerns at rest. From the perspective of Dale Cusack, the Discovery Centre Manager, the project was relatively simple; the Centre's solutions architects set up the required hardware and Pronet's technical team brought in the programme necessary to run the test.

"It was a great illustration of one of the many uses the Discovery Centre can be put to," says Cusack. "We can provide a highly flexible, ‘real-life' testing environment for software development projects," he says. "We can model commercial environments and then change out various components of the network to test different capacities, brands, operating systems etc. It is cost effective and will be highly accessible. It is also very rewarding work to be involved in and a great example of how Ingram Micro is adding value to New Zealand's wider IT community."

Colin Kinross was very satisfied with the outcomes of the testing. "We discovered that memory was not a major consideration but highly efficient processing capacity was required along with some basic caching. This was very useful in terms of how we now proceed and we expect to be doing further testing with Ingram Micro's Discovery Centre in the near future.

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