This German manufacturing company has a long-standing history of delivering construction supply products. Over its 50-year history, this family-operated business has grown to a workforce of more than 1000 employees, with numerous production sites and subsidiaries.
"Our growth and compliance regulations led us to seek a secure and robust virtualization platform,” said the CTO. “A large part of our IT infrastructure has already been virtualized using VMware vSphere.”
Why did they consult the experts at comdivision? They wanted to evaluate their options due to two main concerns. First, one of their data centers needed an expansion and upgrade. Secondly, they wanted to assess their options regarding the threat of ransomware.
Throughout the development of the PoC, a key focus was to ensure minimal or no downtime, as the data center is located next to a production plant, where any interference with manufacturing had to be avoided.
Under the leadership of chief architect, Reinhard Partmann, comdivision suggested using VMware Cloud on AWS services for this PoC.
"We have recently invested in training our specialists to provide consultation and architectural services for VMware Cloud on AWS environments for our customers,” said Partmann. “Amongst the eight Master Competencies we have, we are proud of being the first to achieve the VMware Master Competency for this solution offering in the DACH region,” Partmann continued. “Because of this, my colleagues and I knew that VMware Cloud on AWS is almost tailor-made for an undertaking like this.”
VMware Cloud on AWS uses the same vSphere-based SDDC stack that the customer uses in their on-premises data center, so there was no need for time-consuming re-architecting. Furthermore, the infrastructure admins could use the familiar vSphere user interface without retraining. Using VMware HCX, data could be migrated live to the enterprise-grade infrastructure, which is hosted in an AWS data center near the production facility. Leveraging the AWS network allowed for low latency and high bandwidth network access, without additional load on the cross-company network.
The migrations to the cloud and back went flawlessly. "VMware Cloud on AWS has a high potential,” said the CTO. Initial tests with Veeam and backups moved to S3 Buckets have been successfully tested as well. The next step for the company is to analyze how VMware Cloud on AWS can be integrated into their current disaster recovery concept. "Thanks to VMware could safely migrate our data to the cloud and back. This flexible solution allows for urgent updates and handling load spikes. This Cloud on AWS, we project has demonstrated that we can confidently integrate VMware Cloud on AWS into our disaster recovery strategy as well," the Client's CTO noted.
