Raynet is able to ensure the smooth management of the IT infrastructure of the vessels of D/S NORDEN with limited network availability and by automating many manual tasks.

Customer
Dampskibsselskabet NORDEN A/S (commonly abbreviated NORDEN) is one of Denmark’s oldest Danish shipping companies, founded in 1871. NORDEN operates a mix of owned and chartered dry cargo and product tanker vessels on a global scale. The company is one of the largest operators within the Supramax and Panamax vessel types and operates a total of app. 275 vessels including close to 40 product tankers. NORDEN has its head office in Hellerup, north of Copenhagen, Denmark and offices in Singapore, Shanghai, Annapolis, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Santiago and Melbourne. At its offices NORDEN has in total 300 employees and about 650 are employed on the company’s owned vessels.

Challenge
With many vessels active around the globe, NORDEN’s challenge is to manage their on-board infrastructure comprising racks, UPS, servers and workstations – whether docked or at sea.

The objectives are to actively monitor and manage these devices with a single dashboard gaining an improved overview of the on-board IT equipment. Due to limited connectivity of the vessels` network, traffic must be kept to an absolute minimum and must be supported by caching in times of disconnect. Extra caution is needed to insure no bottle necks arise during connection times with large cached data. Data being communicated bi-directional must adhere to strict compression algorithms to avoid unneeded usage.

Solution
First step in managing the IT assets for NORDEN was to install and configure the RMSi central administration server. In order to discover and inventory all servers and workstations on each vessel with this server, the second step was to install on each vessel one distribution server, which can be a server or workstation. These distribution servers will locally manage the deployment of software to the clients and report back to the central administration server.

With this solution, all IT assets of NORDEN’s vessels can be managed centrally. The intelligent bandwidth management between the central administration server and the distribution server enables the smooth deployment of software packages as well as updates and security patches even with limited bandwidth. The technology of byte level differentiation used by RayManageSofti results in the significant reduction of network traffic. The real-time reporting gives an overview of the IT infrastructure at any time.