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Effectively combining processing power and security, Bull designs, implements and runs internationally renowned solutions for public and private sector organisations alike, that transform information systems into positive drivers for excellence, differentiation and value-creation.
In the UK, Bull employs over 250 staff, based at its registered office in Hemel Hempstead, and regional offices across the UK and Ireland. Bull UK has more than 40 years heritage of designing, building and operating mission-critical systems. Bull is uniquely positioned as a technology integrator exclusively focussed on the mid to high enterprise market. A wide range of private sector customers is supported along with many notable public sector clients within the Local Authority and Higher Education sectors where we are best known.
As an architect of tailor-made solutions Bull provides:
• Virtualisation to unlock business value
• Information storage optimisation
• Cloud-based readiness and deployment
• Role-based access control and identity management
• Business led IT transformation and outsourcing
As a manufacturer, Bull is unique in offering the worlds's fastest VMware server: novascale bullion. The first to use native VMware technology, the bullion server was designed by Bull specifically for the virtualisation of critical enterprise applications. With bullion you can scale beyond industry 4 or 8-way Intel server limits to 12 or 16-way configurations. bullion is more than twice as powerful as the fastest IBM System x3850 servers, and delivers 47% more power then the fastest of the HP DL980 servers. This means you can easily adapt your infrastructure to meet the ever-changing demands of applications operating in Cloud mode. The key characteristics of this platform enable you to bring together applications and databases within a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to build a Private Cloud that will transform your data centre operation.
Innovation is the heartbeat of everything Bull does. Transformation drives all of Bull’s outsourcing and managed services, with leading expertise in business outcome propositions. Critical infrastructure and multi-vendor support services are maintained nationwide for high-availability business systems. World-class extreme computing for national research, defence, and digital simulation for industry are delivered by Bull’s European designed supercomputers.
Contact information
Address
Bull Information Systems Ltd
Maxted Road
Hemel Hempstead
HP2 7DZ
Telephone: 0870 240 0040
Email: information@bull.co.uk
Website: www.bull.co.uk
Press Releases
Bull UK and Ireland appoints Andrew Carr
Andrew Carr appointment coverage - IT_Director_May_2011.pdf 760.97 kB
Ways to Improve Government IT
Comments on Government IT article - Computer_Weekly_May_2011.pdf 554.39 kB
Comments on Open Data Center Alliance
Journey to Cloud comments on OCDA - Computing_and_Computer_Weekly_June_2011.pdf 1.12 MB
Innovative strategy for Journey into the Clouds
Andrew Carr re Cloud Directions - IT_Director_June_2011.pdf 2.18 MB
HPC on Demand - New Models for Industry
HPC on Demand - new models for industry - SNS_UK_July_2011.PDF 915.18 kB
The Role of IT in the Public Sector
Bull UK Discussion Document - The Role of IT in the Public Sector - Aug 2011.pdf 122.75 kB
A Catalyst for Change
A Catalyst for Change - Municipal_Journal_August_2011.pdf 473.25 kB
Bullion server record underpins Private Cloud journey
Economic Recovery and the Role of IT
Economic Recovery and the role of IT - TheManufactuer_Sept_2011.pdf 1.03 MB
Small Competition
SME Competition for Government IT - Information_Age_Sep_2011.pdf 479.53 kB
Bull launches Le Cloud by Bull: a strategic approach, to achieve a smooth transition to the enterprise cloud
Case Studies
Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council Goes Virtual With Bull TCL
A successful, growing business raises space, power and cooling challenges along with concerns over the reliability of business-critical systems.
barnsley_goes_virtual.pdf 135.29 kB
Seeking the Green Balance
There is plenty of conjecture around about what data centre operators should do to "green" their data centres, not always matched in reality. A notable exception, however is Bull Information Systems' joint venture with Barley Metropolitain Borough Council.
Seeking the green balance.pdf 980.72 kB
3-Tier SAP Virtualisation drives down TCO for Manchester Metropolitan University
“Virtualisation offered an effective way of overcoming most of our challenges, making our server estate less complex, easier to manage, more flexible and also driving down the TCO (Total Cost
of Ownership),” says James Kua, Systems Manager for Financial and Legal Services. “We can now easily adapt our computing capabilities in line with operations without costing the earth.”
"With SAP HCM for the Human Resources (HR) department and Payroll coming onboard, ease of deployment and manageability of the server estate is important, especially in view of the size of our team. Bull demonstrated how consolidating servers in a virtualised environment would make the whole system more efficient, easier to manage and flexible enough to cope with any upcoming demands.”
Using Bull Escala and NovaScale servers plus VMware, Bull was able to create much more resilient, consolidated and centralised administration, which also allowed Manchester Metroplitan University (MMU) to reduce overall capital expenditure, management and maintenance costs.
Bull MMU SAP Virtualisation case study.pdf 296.15 kB
Whitepapers
IDC - The Journey to the Cloud - October 2011
European Survey results & Cloud advice sponsored by BullIn its latest dedicated survey, carried out in 2011, IDC showed that a large proportion of companies adopted or are planning to adopt Cloud as a delivery model for parts of their IT. Of the 701 IT managers were interviewed within organisations across Europe and 79% of the respondents stated they are thinking about deploying a Cloud model or have already done so. Of these, 40% have at least one service based on (private or public) Cloud or are in trial phase.
Clouds are now a reality and the leading questions today are clearly no longer about viability or whether Clouds are just a marketing gizmo, but about the timing of the transition and how it should be done for maximum efficiency. In other words, companies are now turning the spotlight on to operational practicalities:
- Which Cloud model best fits our legal, economic, organisational and IT environments?
- What contractual precautions should my company take? How should reversibility be planned?
- Which applications are suitable for a Cloud model? How do I manage my specific environments?
- What service levels can be expected, in terms of uptime and data protection, security and integrity, etc.? Does my service provider have the answers?
- What will be the impact of such a transition on my licence contracts?
- Does the systems management software have to be the same for Cloud and non-Cloud environments?
- Beyond virtualization, orchestration, and self-service management do we have to invest in technologies for capacity planning, performance management and real-time resource optimisation?
This IDC executive brief presents an overview of the Cloud's market maturity and, through case studies, discusses the issues and impacts of a private Cloud initiative, before finally putting forward a series of recommendations for a Cloud roadmap.
WP IDC - The journey to the cloud - UKv0.pdf 583.44 kB
Where Next After Server Virtualisation?
Jeff Spencer of Bull Information Systems maintains that virtualisation is just the start of a journey to wider ICT energy saving initiatives. With energy costs spirllaing and action needed to protect the environment, controlling the electricity consumption of the data centre is becoming an essential challenge for all kinds of businesses and their IT Departments. To address this, many IT Managers have embarked upon rationalising UNIX and commodity x86 servers through virtualisation.
where next after virtualisation published version.pdf 67.31 kB
The Bull NetApp Partnership
The alliance of Bull, a leading European storage integrator, and NetApp, leader in storage technology innovation, delivers customized storage solutions that help you accelerate business breakthroughs and achieve outstanding cost efficiency.
S-BullNetAppPartnership-en1.doc 794.50 kB
Information System Consolidation
Moving towards tomorrow's open and flexible data center.
In an Open World, the ability of organizations to adapt is becoming a major factor for maintening or growing their competitive position. This situation puts a heavy load on information systems, and notably on the data center. An organization can only be as flexible as its information system. That's a real challenge for the monolithic systems and disparate applications of the past. Freeing up heterogeneous IT environments constructed in 'silos', in readiness to meet tomorrow's needs, is becoming a fundamental challenge.
W-Consolidation-en2[1].pdf 401.28 kB
Highly-Scalable, Virtualized Business-Critical Workloads Land on Scale-up x86 Servers
After 12 months of rapidly contracting spending on servers worldwide, demand is stabilizing and the shape of customer behavior is about to change significantly as focus once again shifts to new strategic IT architectures. IDC expects a new wave of software refreshment and consolidation to take place over the next few months, and it will be characterized by a strong push towards scalability and logical consolidation of large software infrastructure.
IDC_virtualised business critical workloads.pdf 193.69 kB
Products
Putting simplicity and security at the heart of private clouds
bullion cloud platformPrivate clouds, built on pervasive virtual infrastructures, are increasingly appealingto organizations looking to deliver IT resources to end-users faster, more reliably, at a lower cost.However, bringing a private cloud and pervasive virtualization to reality could be a daunting task. Security matters as well as the complexity of hardware and software infrastructures may become real challenges for enterprises. At this point they need to have a partner understanding the requirementsof business critical applications on their private cloud to meet Service Level Agreements through flexibility, agility and security.
With bullion cloud platform, Bull has developed, evaluated, selected, implemented, and tightly integrated the best-in-class hardware and software targeting the most demanding needs of enterprises. Moreover, Bull has designed three pre-packaged configurations: Discovery, Department and Enterprise, to closely target the needs of a developers’ team, of a small to medium organization,or of enterprises with the highest requirements in terms of performance and security.
Each bullion cloud platform includes innovative scalable bullion servers integrating VMware vSphere5 and vCloud Director 1.5 combined with best-in-class partner offerings, such as EMC storage, Brocade Unified Networking and Commvault backup, validated and integrated by Bull. The whole platform benefits from Bull’s own banking class security offer. Delivered in a single rack, the bullion cloud platform provides enterprises with a ready-to-run solution meeting the SLA levels required for any type of application, while keeping IT infrastructures simple.
Optimize Your Critical Applications by Pushing Back the Limits of Virtualization
Virtualization has developed at an impressive pace over the past few years, progressing rapidly within Data Centers.
However, until now, virtualization has been limited to infrastructure applications that are relatively simple to virtualize and critical applications, on which the enterprise production relies, are all but excluded from the virtual world.
This is due to the fact that the first generations of virtualization did not meet the requirements of critical applications and their intensive use of resources.
Technical developments in virtualization and a shift in the attitude of application publishers mean that today, all the conditions have been fulfilled to enable virtualization of the Data Center as a whole, including the enterprise critical applications.
novascale bullion, with its reliability, scalability and energy efficiency features, is the ideal platform for this new virtualization momentum.
The Bull services associated with this new platform will simplify its deployment, while meeting its demands in terms of operation and security.
Bull_virtualize the enterprise critical applications.pdf 251.21 kB
Making Your Information System Simple Again.
In a market driven by a central promise: to regain control over the proliferation of servers; novascale bullion a Bull designed system, goes a step further in virtualizing business critical applications. Based on a modular architecture, and natively embedding the VMware ESXi virtualization hypervisor, novascale bullion is the answer to enabling IT departments to consolidate Xeon-based business applications while providing reliability and simplicity.
SPEC_SHEET_BULLION_VA_060410_HD.pdf 2.08 MB
Critical Applications: the Key to Your Business Success
Bringing together an organization’s core expertise and its most sensitive data, critical applications are vital to its growth and productivity. The key to staying ahead of the competition, such systems require ever-present security and unfailing reliability, as well as heightened availability. Everything has to be accessible, all the time and as fast as possible, even during maintenance operations.
BROCHURE_BULLION_VA_060410_HD.pdf 4.80 MB
Bull Escala : Smart Move
Today, a lot of organizations have to address key strategic challenges impacting the future of their IT infrastructure. To support them in their decision making process, Bull has developed a pragmatic customer-centric approach based on its long and well proven experience in infrastructure migration. Bull’s approach is based on a complete methodology that covers the migration landscape (e.g. HP-UX or Sun Solaris) upstream (e.g. with an assessment of the existing environment) and downstream (e.g. with the deployment of the new architecture, in sync with the overall project objectives). Bull has helped many organizations in their rationalisation and consolidation projects, in the public and healthcare sectors, in the Telcos and in the industry.
T-flyer_Smart_Move program eng v3[1].doc 413.00 kB
Improve the Energy-Efficiency of Your Data Center with novascale bullion Servers
Bull places energy performance at the heart of its strategy: the Bio Data Center was introduced in 2007 with the three-fold target of reducing energy consumption and the carbon footprint, optimizing topology and ensuring high service levels within the Data Center. Distributed and poorly utilized servers are power hogs in your Datacenter. Three- to five-year old servers can easily draw up to 600W. The technology used by these machines was not power optimized and led to high energy consumption even when running in idle mode.
novascale bullion is built on an architecture designed from the ground up to provide optimized virtualization and energy saving capabilities. Today novascale bullion servers, which play a major role in the Bio Data Center, become a cornerstone of Bull’s green strategy.
Bull_Improve the energy-efficiency.pdf 262.12 kB
