“The FlexPod white paper, which was created by NetApp and Cisco, was simply perfect and enabled us to familiarize ourselves with the new infrastructure and get it up-and-running by ourselves.”
- Cédric Ghiot ICT Infrastructure Expert, ALD Automotive
CHALLENGE
Placing customer satisfaction at the core of its strategy, ALD Automotive provides fleet managers and drivers with innovative tools and services to make their everyday business easier and resolve new challenges quickly. ALD Automotive was specifically looking for an integrated system with easy manageability, allowing the IT infrastructure department to manage the entire system as a single solution, alleviating the IT workload.
Since the IT department has always used Veeam as the master management console, the new system had to specifically offer robust support for managing data backups and disaster recoveries through the existing Veeam deployment.
SOLUTION
NetApp was able to offer a solution fulfilling all the company’s needs. ALD Automotive then turned to NetApp partner Simac ICT Belgium to implement a mini FlexPod solution consisting of a Cisco mini UCS component and NetApp storage. Simac delivered all components at the ALD Automotive site, but ALD Automotive opted for self-guided installation of the system. Simac then performed a final validation together with ALD Automotive before enabling the production environment onto this newly installed platform.
RESULTS
- Flexible, scalable solution
The mini FlexPod solution is flexible, scalable, stable, and future-proof, with more than enough capacity to handle new initiatives or peak workloads. Thanks to a great improvement in data density, both on compute and storage, ALD Automotive is now able to place the entire infrastructure stack within one rack, enabling great cost savings as well as easy migration.
- Perfect integration with Veeam
Through plugins and APIs, NetApp integrates perfectly with Veeam and truly lives up to the joint promise of ‘Better Together’. Because of the perfect integration between NetApp and Veaam, ALD Automotive is now able to keep their disaster recovery site in-sync. Whenever they decide to perform a DR test, the latest data is always available at the DR site.
- Performance increase and faster results
ALD Automotive now has a stable backup and disaster recovery infrastructure, giving the IT department the confidence that data will always be safeguarded should an unfortunate disaster occur. Moreover, ALD Automotive’s Business Intelligence and Oracle operations have seen a noticeable performance increase, enabling the company to deliver results faster. The system’s overall resilience has also greatly improved.