Trinity House jumps aboard Adapt’s eVDC platform

The General Lighthouse Authorities for the United Kingdom and Ireland (GLAs) are the organisations responsible for the superintendence and management of Aids to Marine Navigation around the coastline of the UK and Republic of Ireland, including the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man and their adjacent seas and islands.

The GLAs prime concern has always been the safety of shipping and the well-being of seafarers in some of the busiest sea-lanes in the world. The Automatic Light Dues Information System (known as ALDIS) is an Internet-based system that processes and calculates light dues levied on commercial shipping.

Collecting light dues is a mission-critical activity that needs to be underpinned by scalable and reliable IT. Trinity House manages this strategic operation on behalf of the DfT and the GLAs.

The revenues raised through ALDIS support the general lighthouse fund (GLF) and is used to provide essential navigational aids. With such a critical system at stake, Trinity House’s infrastructure needs to be highly resilient and robust.

Trinity House selected Adapt’s enterprise Virtual Data Centre (eVDC) platform to manage this vital data and to assure ongoing resilience and uptime. The eVDC platform comprises two data centre sites 70km apart functioning as a single unified platform: a highly secure facility in Woking and a state of the art Tier III specification data centre in Central London.

The solution will provide the GLAs with a highly resilient, protected infrastructure, leaving its team to concentrate on collecting the light dues that keep the operation running.

Captain Ian McNaught, Executive Chairman of Trinity House, explained: “Light dues is the primary source of income generated for the provision of aids to navigation. The data being stored on Adapt’s eVDC is mission critical to the running of our operations. Adapt’s proposal was selected as it delivered the most innovative solution and real value for money. Adapt’s data centres are in keeping with our goals of becoming less environmentally impactful – we have reduced our carbon footprint through the virtualisation of our machines without compromising on infrastructure quality.”

Stewart Smythe, CEO at Adapt said: “Working with Trinity House, budget was understandably a key consideration so we needed to deliver an innovative solution that would still deliver enterprise-class service. Moving Trinity House to our eVDC platform ensures the organisation will never be held back by IT and can continue with its vital work in the knowledge that systems and data will remain accessible and highly secure with the ability to scale. . We’ve found working with Trinity House very rewarding and a great test of our commercial flexibility – without compromising on service quality.”