The company ensures complete deliveries of a full range of electrical installation services in the Czech market and globally. It was established in 1993 and has developed successfully. Its annual turnover is CZK 700-850 million.
The project as a whole was aimed at extending the use of IS, while increasing the internal efficiency of the company. The goal was to streamline the company’s communications, both internally and externally, through the new optimized software solutions. However, this would require adequate hardware to matching the growing demands for the speed of data processing and storage. With the acquisition of free data storage, it was possible to implement a data backup system, including mail user agents, and to create a consolidated data repository where data from central and satellite servers and selected user stations are backed up.
Pavel Nekuda, IT manager, Elektromont Brno a.s.
Task
Before the virtualization, the client had been using five older servers of different brands to run the company’s business applications, including a critical contract management application. All these servers were more than five years old, past warranty, and far from able to meet the company’s needs. Given the progressive growth of the company, the existing infrastructure had to be completely rebuilt.
The objectives of the virtualization were mainly to increase the accessibility of critical applications, enhance computing performance, and make work more efficient as a result. Another objective was to simplify administration, including unified management of the whole environment.
Solutions
After a detailed analysis of the customer’s environment, a solution was designed based on a two-node virtualized cluster with shared disk storage space. Altogether, two HP DL380 servers, a 2000 G3 MSA array system, and MS Windows Datacenter Edition operating systems were established. The Hyper-V technology was selected as a virtualization platform that fully met the customer’s requirements for high accessibility. All these were interconnected with Fibre Channel technology.
The desired simplification and streamlining of the entire environment was achieved by deploying a product from the Microsoft System Center Essentials, which was selected as an overarching tool for the environment management. The D2D backup strategy was applied using the SW Symantec Backup Exec and individual agents to back up data from the operated virtual servers.
Infinity executed a complete migration of the existing servers into a virtual environment, excluded all non-compliant equipment, consolidated and set backup processes, and provided the client with a solid foundation for its future development.
Achievements
The outcome of the completed virtualization and consolidation project was a well arranged infrastructure with clearly defined rules and highly accessible applications. The solution led to simplified management of the entire environment through a single tool and increased comfort for all users working with individual business applications. Thanks to these changes, the costs of the infrastructure management and the electric power needed to run the infrastructure were also reduced by more than 50%. At the same time, the data processing speed and efficiency of the work itself increased by up to 30%.
Business Impacts
The costs of the company’s IT infrastructure management were dramatically reduced and the speed of data processing and labour efficiency were significantly increased.
