Health and wellbeing of employees at its customers, that’s what it is all about for IDEWE. These days, even a thoroughly warm and human activity like this undergoes a digital transformation. IDEWE offers ever more digital tools to support its customers. This impacts the way the IT department works. That’s why IDEWE recently decided to start the future now by investing in HyperConverged Infrastructure (HCI).
HCI had already been considered when IDEWE’s IT environment underwent technology refreshes, but the true benefits of HCI could only be reached when enough standardization had taken place. In 2019, this was finally the case, and IDEWE consulted the market for the right HCI solution.
To decide on which solutions bet fit IDEWE, Simac organized a series of workshops with the IDEWE systems engineers, comparing the different HCI systems available in the market. “These workshops were illuminating,” David Vanneck, ICT Infrastructure and Services Manager at Groep IDEWE, reflects. “Simac has good insights in the strengths and weaknesses of all available solutions. They have extensive expertise in the portfolio they offer and have hands-on experience. From these workshops it became very clear that they have a good command of this technology and its potential.”
In the end the choice was made for NetApp HCI. A number of factors contributed to that decision, such as the independence between storage and compute, so they can scale separately, and the perfect integration with the existing NetApp environment.
The migration was prepared in the summer of 2019, and the development and test environment were migrated first. The production environment was migrated gradually and with minimal disruption in September and October. The migration went very smooth, thanks to the thorough preparation by Simac.
IDEWE is very positive about the collaboration with Simac. “Their project management is always excellent. They also have a lot of experience with the numerous components of our infrastructure, which allows them to propose solutions rapidly.” Vanneck also praises the flexibility of the IT service provider. “When changes are needed, they handle these smoothly. I can assure you this is not the case with all service providers. It’s aspects like this that create added value for us.”
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