Tecan Trading

In Brief

Challenges

• Highly distributed IT infrastructure made management difficult
• Lack of standardized backup and restore processes
• Global IT support difficult due to differing local standards

Solution

• SteelFusion™ Edge
• SteelFusion™ Core

Benefits

• Standardized backup processes, providing greater data security
• Consolidation of resources and services
• More flexible and scalable support for growth
• Less tape handling with restore and backup defined by SLAs

Riverbed SteelFusion frees Tecan from its branch site infrastructure challenge

The company’s overall goal for its IT environment is flexibility and scalability. As a computing resource, IT needs to be able to reflect and support Tecan’s business objectives for growth and must not be hindered by technical constraints. Tecan wanted an agile service infrastructure which would allow them to simplify and standardize remote site IT management, increase the protection and security of global data and achieve instant recovery.

Challenge: Fragmented and Inflexible IT

Tecan’s IT strategy is about building strategic ecosystems which can be managed centrally. It hosts many of its strategic business applications centrally such as those for ERP/CRM and HR and is also deploying VoIP, Citrix and VMware from its central data center. Other services such as DFS services and backup and restore were managed locally. Tecan’s growth in the last two decades added complexity and created a sprawling architecture. “Nothing was standardized in our IT infrastructure. We had six different server rooms worldwide; different hardware suppliers and different service managers,” explains Marc Ehinger, Head Global IT Infrastructure, at Tecan.

Backing up all company data for example, could involve using ten different backup restore reviews in ten countries, plus restore tests using ten different standards. “I felt we could do a lot more to make our business even more secure and reduce the chances of outages and data loss,” adds Ehinger. “We were trying to use our field-based IT teams to perform important backup tasks and because each in-country team worked to their own processes and standards, it was difficult to share knowledge between teams. This made global IT support difficult.”

Solution: Riverbed SteelFusion – central control, local performance, and instant recovery

Consolidating the fragmented infrastructure and standardizing processes around a centralized approach called for a powerful and flexible solution. “We already had a strong partnership with Riverbed Technology, as we were using Riverbed SteelHead™, a WAN optimization solution, to optimize our MPLS network between Group HQ in Switzerland and Asia,” explains Ehinger. “We saw the merits of extending our partnership particularly as we shared Riverbed’s views around the hybrid enterprise.” As a result, Tecan decided to centralize local servers and storage to the data center using Riverbed SteelFusion™.

A key part of the Riverbed Application Performance Platform™, SteelFusion is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that enables zero IT at the branch. SteelFusion consolidates 100% of data and servers out of the branches and into the data center where it can be properly secured, managed and protected, while ensuring fast local performance of branch applications and services. “If possible, I wanted to get rid of all our servers located locally within branches but I was worried about the impact on performance. SteelFusion’s ability to virtually project data and services back to the branch helped us achieve these objectives,” states Ehinger.

Tecan is now able to take advantage of a modern, highly-virtualized architecture to automate, provision, backup and restore branch offices from the data center.

Riverbed SteelFusion Edge has been deployed at two of Tecan’s US sites, San Jose, California and Morrisville, North Carolina. SteelFusion Edge is a converged appliance that integrates server, storage, network and virtualization to run local branch applications. Riverbed SteelFusion Core is installed at the Zurich data center and a backup site in Lupfig. A storage delivery controller that interfaces with a storage area network (SAN), SteelFusion Core projects centralized virtual machines and data out to branches, eliminates branch backups and provides instant provisioning and recovery of branch services. “If there is an outage at Zurich, there is an automated fail-out to Lupfig,” says Ehinger. “If we have a disaster at San Jose, we can boot the whole server from a site in Männedorf, where we have also installed SteelFusion Edge for disaster recovery purposes, and for providing some local services that can’t be operated in Zurich. In addition, our compute resource can now be managed through a single control panel.”

Benefits: Improved data security, more flexibility, enhanced scalability

SteelFusion has improved data security. “I can now do one backup review and I know I have all sites secure from a storage and disaster recovery point of view,” says Ehinger.

And SteelFusion is helping Tecan create a ‘Flexible Service Infrastructure’. “This is a common architecture from which we can create solutions for our business needs,” notes Ehinger. “We radically changed the way IT is organized. We are more service-oriented and work as a single IT platform managed on a ‘follow-the-sun’ basis. It allows us to move applications, servers or storage around and optimize our SLAs. We can integrate new divisions into our business, replicate their storage and move virtual servers to our platform. As a result, I believe we are now more agile than most service providers.”

“It is now much easier to scale our business,” concludes Ehinger. “Whereas before it took around six months, we can now set up a new branch office with servers and storage in a much shorter time period. I don’t see how we could have done this without Riverbed using their follow the sun team.”

“I wanted an IT infrastructure which could be managed centrally without compromising performance locally. Riverbed has enabled us to scale our business more easily and backup our entire estate from one central control panel.”

“I can now do one backup review and I know I have all sites secure from a storage and disaster recovery point of view.”

“ We have radically changed the way IT is organized. With a single IT platform, we can move applications, servers or storage around and optimize our SLAs. We are now more agile than most service providers.”