The online printing market is highly competitive. New processes increase the variety of products on offer, but these processes must be made usable as easily as possible for the customer. In the case of our customer – a media company and online printing company – that means that new apps are rolled out almost every month. Be it for the creation of classic flyers, stickers and posters, trade fair and advertising technology such as rollups or screen printing, or advertising materials such as mugs or mouse pads. It must be possible for their customers to create or design every product easily online
Our customer has more than 1500 employees in Germany alone and produces both in-house and with partners. The infrastructure, consisting of 25 hosts at three locations, was recently delivered by an IT services company.
"The new state-of-the-art hyperconverged infrastructure was generously designed," says Yves Sandfort, "but without a coherent overall concept of how the provisioning, upgrades and management are coordinated, the customer quickly ran the risk of getting bogged down."
“We have a long-term strategy to make our current on-premises infrastructure more flexible with a hybrid cloud concept” reports the infrastructure manager, “but it was clear to us that our on-prem infrastructure had to be designed and configured first so a hybrid cloud could be to be based on this."
"The customer was very motivated and wanted to test and implement the entire VMware portfolio at once," says Sandfort with a wink"they wanted to secure their network with NSX and make the developers happy with Tanzu." But first of all, the basis had to be created:
"As a first step, we analyzed the customer'senvironment together with the customer to determine whether the basic life-cycle management was working," reports Sandfort. "Then we set goals and priorities together with the infrastructure team. The goal was very clear that the server infrastructure on-premises had to be better monitored andautomated with regard to the detection of VMware Cloud Foundation and SDDCManager components. In addition, we suggested testing vRealize OperationsManager in order to get an overview of resource usage and to ensure cross-cloud monitoring and availability. "
In many cases, printing machines require adjacent systems on-prem. These systems had to be monitored and controlled from the head office "with VCF Federation we were able to create a network, a group ofCloud Foundation instances at the customer, so that each member can view information about the other Cloud Foundation instances in the group,"explains Sandfort "The necessary visualization takes place via theMulti-Instance Management Dashboard in the SDDC Manager".
By minimizing ongoing management, automating the administration of configurations and a unified view of deployments, centralized management and updating of the Cloud Foundation environment, the customer was able to focus onnew projects such as the introduction of NSX and Tanzu.
"With the introduction of vRealize Operations we were able to consolidate compute resources, which now gives us more time to tackle the next construction sites," says the Infrastructure Manager. “ One thing is clear, thanks to the comprehensive experience with all products in the VMware range, comdivision was able to advise us better which of all the great functions and promises really makes sense for us. “
