This global player with around 5.000 employees has a presence in more than 60 countries and 10 production plants in 4 countries. “We consider ourselves among the market leaders of high-tech machines for furniture production” says the CIO. “Our infrastructure must be managed and operated 24/7, because somewhere in the world, somebody is always working” he continued, “we have no IT-personnel at the majority of our (production-) locations and were using local service providers to provide the infrastructure, but are not satisfied with the quality service and looking for an alternative” he concludes
Fabian Lenz, comdivision’s lead architect on the case, immediately thought that VMware Cloud on AWS would be a good fit for the future. However, Lenz also knew, they needed to get a better grasp on what is running where and how the infrastructure is working before they could even start working on migrating to a better service.
“While we were planning to move away from our current service partners, we needed to ensure that the current service is not deteriorating any further, so obviously we couldn’t ask for their help” said the CIO. “The first and second level support was done by our service partners and only third-level support was done by my guys here at our headquarters in Germany” he explained. “The major problem with our current contracts is, that our partners have a large turnover and fluctuation of service employees, so that our in-house specialists were burning the midnight oil to keep production running with our high availability systems”said the CIO.
Therefore a system was needed that could be used in the current setup to create performance and risk analysis: “I advised the customer, that in order to plan the migration, we needed to be able to plan the performance, capacity and dependencies of allsystems in the organization” said Lenz.
“With VMware vRealize Operations Cloud we have a have unified view across the entire infrastructure, all office-campus datacenter and production sites” explained Lenz and continued: “best of all, once we moved to a new Multi-Cloud infrastructure, where we probably will keep some of the infrastructure on-premises, shut down the on-prem service at two locations and move them to aCloud-only service, we would be be able to keep the operations management stack.
With vRealizeOperations they got automated, continuous, self-learning and targeted performance and capacity optimization as well as correction recommendations through predictive analytics. “We will use this information to prove to our service partners, where they are not adhering to our SLA” said the CIO “so for the remainder of the contract, we could prevent a majority of the service calls and free up time here at headquarters”. “Now my specialists can focus on working with comdivision to set up the new infrastructure, where we will integrate compliance and automated drift correction features to ensure that risks are reduced”.
“Next on the agenda is the implementation of VMware Cloud on AWS and then we are working on getting the infrastructure ISO 27001 certified” explained Lenz “this is certainly a big deal, but the visibility provided by vRealize OperationsManager makes my job much easier” Lenz concluded.
