Epic Information Solutions was the gold winner of this year’s Best Enterprise Solution CEA category for its virtualization-based solution it designed and implemented for the WorldSkills Calgary 2009 competition.
Epic designed and built a virtual solution for the WorldSkills Calgary competition in 2009, which was a week-long event, with about 1,000 competitors that travelled from around the world. The competition was made up of various competitions that were designed to showcase the specialized skills and talents of individuals competing in 45 trade, service and technology vocation fields.
Due to the nature and set up of the competition, Epic was tasked with creating a virtual solution for WorldSkills Calgary that would allow hardware to be configured so it would have the capacity to support an almost open-ended number of virtual servers.
In the end, there were four physical servers that supported 40 virtual servers during the competition. These virtual servers enabled a complete system platform that supported the operating system in addition to the program software that was necessary for each competition event. This way, when judges logged into their workstations, they were automatically connected to a virtual server that was created for the event they were keeping score for. In addition to this, Epic also created 55 virtual desktops that allowed any computer to work in a common environment.
For security purposes, Epic had built-in security, backup and recovery features in the physical servers that would ensure the systems had 100 per cent uptime and was easily accessible for the whole duration of the week-long event.
David Reid, president and CEO of Winnipeg, Man.-based Epic, said each of the events in the competition had judges that required secure access to computers in order to keep score and for other PC-related tasks. Because the solution was scalable, once the initial hardware was purchased, no additional hardware or software products were needed to be bought afterwards.
The other winners in this category were Acrodex, who won the silver award and Jolera Inc., who won the bronze award.