This "classic" retailer operates more than 50 branches in Germany and 20 more across Europe and has recently updated some of its data centers to take account of the growing number of branches that had to be integrated into the company's IT through acquisitions. However, during the 2020 pandemic, when most stores had to close, management was forced to make changes to its IT infrastructure strategy. "The sudden closure of our retail stores has shown our senior management the value of a flexible cloud strategy," said the client's project manager. “Comdivision helped us to implement optimizations quickly during the shutdown and without endangering the business as soon as the shops were reopened.
"They had just started to procure a new HCI infrastructure,” reports Yves Sandfort, comdivisions project manager at the customer. “The new infrastructure was converted to HCI with the best intentions: more efficiency and consolidation of the IT teams, more performance and security” continued Sandfort "But: Hardware scalability on-premises is great, but only as long as the fluctuations are long-term – short-term fluctuations, or better: reducing resources for a few months or even weeks cannot be absorbed even with the most flexible on-prem infrastructure".
"We still operate on-prem data centers at some(foreign) locations, "says the infrastructure manager of the customer," this is mainly due to acquisitions that we made, since these were neither hardware nor software compatible, they had to be integrated".
For various reasons – including compliance – our customer wanted to keep the data of the national organizations in the respective country as much as possible. "A public cloud option was therefore not going to work for some workloads," said Yves Sandfort, "but a private off-prem cloud solution was feasible".
"We suggested converting the infrastructure to VMware Cloud Foundation," explains Sandfort, "this gave us the opportunity to not only standardize the infrastructure, but also to manage it centrally via VMware Cloud Foundation Federation", and the workloads that wewanted to burst into the Cloud could also be managed and distribute flexibly from a central location.
The customer traditionally relies on Microsoft for it send user environment, so some departments have already switched to Horizon onAzure. This enabled us to bring the workloads close to the VDI environment using VCF in order to avoid latency problems.
The customer plans to automate his IT as much as possible in the future.New desktops should be accessed and provisioned via self-service, “but this isa project that we will tackle later,” says the customer's CIO. “First of all, we are glad that we are significantly reducing the workload for our IT department with the standardized environment and we are prepared to flexibly react to the requirements of the next few years” he concluded.
