A "traditional" retailer operates more than 50 branches in Germany and an additional 20 throughout Europe. Recently, they upgraded several of their data centers to accommodate the growing number of branches, which had to be integrated into the company's IT due to acquisitions. However, during the 2020 pandemic, when many stores had to close, the company's leadership was compelled to reconsider its IT infrastructure strategy. "The sudden closure of our stores highlighted to management the value of a flexible cloud strategy," reported the client's project manager. "comdivision assisted us in quickly implementing optimizations during the shutdown, ensuring business continuity once the stores reopened."
"We had just started procuring a new HCI infrastructure," shared Yves Sandfort, comdivision's project manager for the client. "The new infrastructure was redesigned with the goal of achieving greater efficiency, consolidating the IT teams, and enhancing performance and security," Sandfort continued. "On-premises hardware scalability is excellent as long as fluctuations are long-term. However, short-term fluctuations, especially resource reductions for just a few months or weeks, can't be addressed, even with the most flexible infrastructure."
"In some locations, including abroad, we still operate on-prem data centers," the client's infrastructure head explained. "This is primarily due to acquisitions. Since they weren't compatible in terms of hardware and software, they had to be integrated." Our client wanted to keep the data of national organizations primarily in their respective countries, mainly for compliance reasons. "A Public Cloud wasn't suitable for some workloads," Yves Sandfort stated, "but a private off-prem cloud solution was feasible."
"We suggested transitioning the infrastructure to VMware Cloud Foundation," Sandfort elucidated. "This allowed us not only to standardize the infrastructure but also to centrally manage it through VMware Cloud Foundation Federation. Furthermore, we were able to flexibly manage and distribute the workloads we wanted to move to the cloud."
The client traditionally relies on Microsoft for its end-user environment. Several departments have already transitioned to Horizon on Azure. This enabled us to bring the workloads closer to the VDI environment using VCF, avoiding latency issues.
The client plans to largely automate its IT in the future. New desktops will be provided via self-service. "This is a project we'll tackle later," the client's CIO stated. "For now, we're pleased that the standardized environment has significantly reduced the workload for our IT department, ensuring we're agile and ready for future challenges."
