vCORE Case Study
Overview
vCORE designed and delivered an innovative infrastructure refresh solution for a major automotive manufacturer that dramatically enhanced the client’s storage, compute and network capabilities while reducing long-term costs.
The client desired to reduce both its recovery point objective and recovery time objective with a new disaster recovery site without dramatically increasing capital expenditures for the year. Meanwhile, the company needed to simplify its production site infrastructure to boost speed, reliability and security.
vCORE was able to move the client’s storage from multi-vendor islands to a single vendor with all-flash, reduce computing complexity and strengthen network capabilities to ensure full data center replication and improved RTO and RPO — all while realizing about $500,000 in cost savings.
The Client
The client’s IT organization, part of a major automotive manufacturer with global operations and annual revenue in the billions of dollars, is tasked with maintaining all dealership services, executing internal IT operations for more than 1,000 employees, managing two large-scale ERP systems for business operations and finance, and supporting strategic initiatives from the applications team.
The client approached vCORE for guidance in modernizing its data center capabilities, including refreshed storage, compute and network infrastructure and a full disaster recovery site. All of this would need to be delivered without straining the organization’s capital expenditure budget.
The Problem
The auto manufacturer’s existing infrastructure included storage islands from at least three vendors, disaster recovery capabilities limited to tier 1 only and spinning-disk hybrids that were slower and had higher failure rates.
Computing rackmounts brought challenges with disparate management, high complexity and a high mean time to resolution as servers required reconfiguration upon replacement.
Network infrastructure, meanwhile, was plagued by outages caused by bugs/firmware versions, network speeds that were too slow to provide full storage replication and protocol that presented security risks.
The Solution
vCORE helped the client consolidate and simplify its storage infrastructure to a single vendor, upgrade its production site to faster, more-reliable all-flash storage while re-purposing the previous hardware for a full build-out of the disaster recovery site.
New compute infrastructure provided central management that cascaded configurations to the server blades, reduced complexity with fewer cables/transceivers, and improved mean time to resolution, as the blades can be swapped without any reconfiguration.
vCORE’s network solution provided the client with 10x faster speeds to allow for full storage replication while providing uniformity across the production and DR sites. The new protocol runs on an isolated/dedicated network separate from the IP network allowing for more security, lower latency, and greater stability.
The Outcome
Full implementation of the new solutions from vCORE is bringing transformative results to the client’s IT organization, including:
- Greater flexibility to scale and accommodate business growth;
- More-accurate cost forecasting;
- Maintaining/exceeding application service levels;
- 7x better performance with all-flash storage compared to previous solution;
- Self-tuning technology to accommodate all environments;
- Refresh cost reduced by $564,000 through vendor consolidation;
- Potential savings of $2 million in tier 1 ERP infrastructure;
- Improvements in RPO & RTO and greater efficiency through automation.
