Europcar South Africa reduces energy consumption by around 25 percent, helping IT align with a company-wide ‘green’ policy to minimise its carbon footprint, while increasing its productivity by 85 percent.

SituationAfter reviewing performance across all operations, including IT, as part of a drive to increase growth and reduce overheads, Europcar South Africa felt that a Microsoft-based IT infrastructure could support the business more effectively and so it embarked on a major project to deliver better IT services through enterprise efficiency.

Shaun Phillips, general manager, IT Operations and Infrastructure, Europcar South Africa, said: “Key goals included bringing the physical IT infrastructure back in-house – which meant building a new datacentre and virtualizing both servers and storage. Furthermore, we wanted to establish a platform for unified communications so that we could enable real-time communication in the future.

“We needed to work with an IT solutions provider with plenty of experience in delivering virtualization projects. I’ve worked with Dell before and knew that Dell Consulting Services had the experience to deliver this type of solution successfully.”

Europcar South Africa’s environment was holistically reviewed to determine how to map the proposed changes back to its

overall IT goals. An initial meeting refined the project’s objectives and drivers and identified key roles and responsibilities during engagement. Detailed plans for the following seven areas of the infrastructure were identified:

Active Directory Messaging and collaboration Anti-malware, anti-virus and firewall

protection Data security Systems management Virtualization Physical environment.

SolutionDeployment was also divided into phases, with each phase checked and signed off by Phillips before the consultants moved on to the next piece of work. Throughout the implementation, IT personnel shadowed the consultants as part of a skills transfer strategy.

“The phased deployment by Dell Consulting Services was based on its highly successful methodologies and helped us avoid any significant challenges. Furthermore, because of the knowledge

Customer: Europcar South AfricaWebsite: http://www.europcar.co.zaCustomer Size: 900 employeesCountry or Region: South AfricaIndustry: Car rentalPartner: Dell Professional ServicesCustomer Profile: A Europcar South Africa, a member of the world’s largest car rental network, is owned and managed by the Imperial Group Ltd, one of South Africa’s premier listed industrial groups. Previously Imperial Car Rental, the company has operated exclusively as Europcar South Africa since June 2009 and is proud to hold a Level Three broad-based Black Economic Empowerment rating.Judged as Africa’s leading car hire company at the 2010 World Travel Awards (for the fifth consecutive year) the company controls around a third of the SA car rental market and consistently invests in new infrastructure and facilities to ensure that it offers world-class and state-of-the-art services to business and leisure car rental customers from around the world.

Holding ISO9001 (2008) accreditation, Europcar South Africa is a member of the South African Vehicle Rental and Leasing Association and has partnerships with several important service providers in the travel industry, including Kulula, South African Airways, Discovery Vitality and Southern Sun.

Car rental company cuts energy consumption and increases productivity

transfer programme, we were able to maximise the performance of our new

solution from the beginning,” said Phillips:

The company has simplified its IT by creating a highly consolidated virtualized environment for its new datacentre. “We use Microsoft software throughout our server stack and the maturity of Hyper-V, combined with our Microsoft licensing agreement, made it the right choice for us.”

As a result of the new environment, Europcar now has a Microsoft Unified Communications platform and Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 infrastructure. Europcar has rolled out Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 which completed the communications stack.

BenefitsToday, Europcar can deliver new services to personnel faster and more easily. This is because of the use of Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, which enables the IT team to create and administer virtual machines centrally.

“We can provide a new server in just 45 min,” said Phillips. “In the past, it could take six weeks to procure and then configure physical servers. It means that employees gain access to new software solutions more quickly to increase their productivity.”

With its new virtualized infrastructure, Europcar has significantly cut IT energy use. This is due to consolidation and the servers’ Dell Energy Smart technologies, which improve the servers’ thermal management and power efficiency.

“We have reduced energy consumption by around 25 percent, helping IT align with a company-wide policy to minimise the carbon footprint.

“Added to which the different components of our management infrastructure were integrated easily and seamlessly and have proved to be easy to manage. We’ve increased IT productivity by around 85 percent,” Phillips concluded.

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Document published 06/08/03

Green is Europcar South Africa’s colour, but green is far more than a colour with the company which focuses heavily on the promotion on environmental responsibility, awareness and behaviour throughout its operations.

Software and services:Windows Server® 2008 R2 with Hyper-V™Microsoft Exchange Server 2010Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2Dell™ OpenManage™ systems management softwareDell EqualLogic Auto-Replication

Hardware:Dell™ PowerEdge™ R710 and R610 servers with Intel® Xeon® Processors E5540Dell EqualLogic PS6500E and PS6000XV storage area networks (SAN)

For more information about other Microsoft customer successes, please visit: www.microsoft.com/casestudies