Intelligent IT plattform

A customized IT plattform for high demands on a modern IT infrastructure

In order to be able to guarantee the availability of its IT services, Regionalwerke AG Baden places high demands on a modern IT infrastructure. With HPE SimpliVity, Regionalwerke AG Baden now has a highly available, flexible and high-performance IT infrastructure with a state-of-the-art backup solution. Thanks to the predictive and intelligent processes of HPE InfoSight, the company has been able to greatly reduce the risk of downtime while realizing major efficiency gains in administration and maintenance.

Customer

In line with the principles of «Service – Performance – Energy» , the 135 employees of RWB are committed to their customers every day, supplying them safely and reliably with water, electricity, natural gas/biogas and district heating. In addition, the company offers a wide range of services – also for third parties. Regionalwerke Holding AG Baden is 100% owned by the municipality of Baden. The Regionalwerke Baden group consists of Regionalwerke Holding AG Baden, Regionalwerke AG Baden and Limmatkraftwerke AG.

Initial situation: Maintenance-intensive and heterogeneous IT infrastructure.

The heterogeneous IT landscape consisted of various virtualized servers and a virtual desktop infrastructure with about 60 VMs and about 100 VDIs. Due to the growing requirements, the data center infrastructure was increasingly reaching its performance limits. The detailed performance analysis of CPU requirements, I/O performance and future data growth came to the conclusion that a modernization of the infrastructure was necessary. Further arguments were the complex and costly administration as well as the large maintenance effort of the environment.

Challenge: Redundant high availability, central administration and modern backup solution

In order to be able to guarantee high-availability IT services for internal and external customers, data center redundancy across two locations was to be implemented at the same time as the infrastructure renewal.
• High-availability and high-performance IT infrastructure
• Simple and central administration
• Reduction of support effort
• High data compression and duplicate detection (deduplication)
• Modern backup solution with fast recovery

Solution: Intelligent IT infrastructure with HPE SimpliVity and HPE Infosight

Together with the specialists from redIT Services AG, both traditional and hyperconvergent infrastructure architectures were examined during the solution evaluation. The visit and in-depth expertise at the HPE Customer Briefing Center in Dübendorf confirmed RWB’s decision to opt for the hyperconvergent solution with HPE SimpliVity. The solution includes features for VM management, mobility, integrated data protection, disaster recovery and outstanding data efficiency. The customer requirements were realized with a 4 node solution with HPE SimpliVity 380; with 2 nodes per data center site.

• Reliability
High availability with only 2 nodes – HPE SimpliVity tolerates one node failure without data loss.

• Backup
Full logical VM backups through policy-based automation.

• Recovery
Integrated, automated, and fast (1 TB VM in about 60 s) multi-site data backup and disaster recovery capabilities reduce the risk of data loss, costly downtime, and increase data security.

• Preventive maintenance

HPE InfoSight’s AI-powered predictive analytics fix «problems» before they happen.

Conclusion: An IT infrastructure tailored to the requirements

Together with the specialists from redIT Services AG, both traditional and hyperconvergent infrastructure architectures were examined during the solution evaluation. The visit and in-depth expertise at the HPE Customer Briefing Center in Dübendorf confirmed RWB’s decision to opt for the hyperconvergent solution with HPE SimpliVity. Included in the solution are features for VM management, mobility, integrated data protection, disaster recovery and outstanding data efficiency. The customer’s requirements were met with a 4 node solution with HPE SimpliVity 380; with 2 nodes per data center location.