nkt cables
RIVERBED HELPS MANUFACTURING COMPANY CENTRALIZE RESOURCES AND ACHIEVE SUBSTANTIAL SAVINGS
nkt cables is a global supplier of cables and cable solutions to the energy sector. The company is headquartered in Cologne and has subsidiaries across Europe and Asia Pacific. The company has over 3500 employees and revenues of around 1.2 billion Euros.
Continued expansion, resulting from the company’s successful growth strategy, saw new sites opening across Europe and Asia. Each site had its own physical and virtual servers, plus local storage, services and backup, making the large estate challenging to manage. Localized backups were making it difficult to provide comprehensive data protection, which had implications for disaster recovery.
IN BRIEF
Industry
Challenges
- Widely dispersed and somewhat fragmented IT infrastructure difficult to manage
- Backups done locally, compromising data security and making disaster recovery more challenging
- Can take significant time to provision site core infrastructure (server, storage, backup)
- IT administration requiring lots of employee time
Solution
- Riverbed SteelFusion™ Branch Converged Infrastructure
Benefits
- Consolidated many IT resources, gaining greater control
- Backups now centralized, providing greater data security
- Centralization and optimization producing substantial cost savings
- Faster provisioning and less time spent on IT administration
Riverbed® SteelFusion™ has enabled the company to move its data, storage and services to the data center and have complete central control. The provisioning of infrastructure for new sites is now quick and easy, backups are reliable and secured, and less time is spent on local IT administration. Centralizing resources at the data center has also enabled substantial cost savings to be made.
BETTER PROVISIONING AND BACKUP REQUIRED FOR GLOBAL SUBSIDIARIES
The global nature of nkt cables’ business meant that its IT infrastructure was widely dispersed, somewhat fragmented and complex to manage. The company had around a dozen data centers and server rooms across Europe, China and Australia.“We had an MPLS WAN with a decentralized IT infrastructure and many local resources,” explains Markus Weber, Group IT Infrastructure Manager at nkt cables. Each site had at least a physical server with integrated storage, plus a minimum of five virtual servers supporting services such as DCHP, DNS, print and file sharing.
Backups were also managed locally. “There was no central management for backups, and so we couldn’t be certain that this was being done properly at a local level. This also had implications for our disaster recovery processes,” says Peter Knösel, SteelFusion Project Manager from nkt cables. As nkt cables’ business expanded, new sites were opening across the globe. Getting new sites operational as quickly as possible was a priority. “It could take up to two months to provision the core infrastructure per site; and we wanted to reduce this timescale,” notes Weber.
Besides its operational solutions, the main applications being used by nkt cables are SAP, Exchange and SharePoint. “In line with our IT strategy, we have moved from a decentralized landscape to centralized systems which can be managed more efficiently,” says Weber, “We wanted a single domain for all our locations to centralize applications like Exchange. This required the standardization of the local infrastructure, services, storage and backup.”
nkt cables considered two options: providing every site with its own dedicated IT infrastructure, including backup, or to migrate to a branch converged infrastructure, which moved most resources to the data center.
LOCAL BRANCH IT PERFORMANCE WITH LESS SITE INFRASTRUCTURE
nkt cables wanted to simplify its infrastructure, centralize resources and manage its IT more efficiently. “SteelFusion looked like the best solution and was compatible with our virtualized environment. But it was also critical that we achieved good performance and high availability at each location,” says Weber. The company conducted a Proof of Concept (POC) that involved deploying SteelFusion at a data center in Cologne and at nkt cables facilities in Berlin.
“We deployed a number of virtual machines for testing purposes,” says Knösel, “It was feasible to deploy new virtual machines efficiently and the WAN optimization you get with SteelFusion gave us good application performance. The project team received very positive feedback from the user community.”
The POC results convinced nkt cables that SteelFusion would help the company achieve its goal of centralizing key resources. “In fact, we were so confident about SteelFusion that its first deployment was in Sweden, where we had acquired a new company, and had to develop required IT systems from scratch,” explains Knösel. “It was a major deployment, with 300 employees and 150 seats on-site. We trusted the SteelFusion technology and our confidence was more than rewarded, because services were up and running in less than two months – everything went very smoothly.”
SteelFusion’s patented BlockStream™ technology centralizes data in the data center and projects a working set out to the remote sites. We have now deployed SteelFusion branch converged infrastructure at two more sites, and in both cases, integration was smooth,” says Knösel. “We did have some assistance from Riverbed Professional Services, which was very useful. However, we didn’t need a lot of help because we have a standardized process for adding SteelFusion to our network infrastructure – the initial deployment of SteelFusion Core took just one day, based on the experience gathered during the POC.”
CENTRAL, SIMPLIFIED CONTROL FOR IMPROVED IT MANAGEMENT, REDUCED COSTS AND GREATER SECURITY
Centralizing resources, simplifying infrastructure and standardizing local resources has brought many benefits for nkt cables, “We now have a centralized backup solution, so our data is more secure,” says Knösel, “and we have a robust disaster recovery solution in one place. Having a standardized deployment at site level means less time is needed for IT operations.” Cost savings have also been achieved, “Not only have we achieved greater efficiencies with SteelFusion, but the optimization it provides also means we are getting much more from our existing WAN infrastructure, which has helped us reduce costs,” notes Weber.
nkt cables estimates that the substantial cost savings have also been achieved by eliminating the need for external providers to maintain local systems, and by local staff no longer required to manage backups on site. Disaster recovery has also been centralized. “Standardizing IT administration and having more control centrally means we will achieve significant savings,” says Weber.
“Without SteelFusion, we would have to provide a lot of IT infrastructure at the site level, including backup, and that would be much more expensive,” says Weber, “and our IT would be harder to manage. Our Swedish operations has been transitioned efficiently into the centralized IT landscape with SteelFusion, and this also applies to other locations.”
“SteelFusion fully matches our IT vision; helping us to simplify the infrastructure, reduce the management burden at smaller sites, and centralize services and data in the main data centers.”
