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CHALLENGE.
Elsa-Mifroma’s ageing infrastructure was no longer able to manage the demands that food processing placed it under. Storage performance was insufficient and system stability left something to be desired.
“We need to ensure system reliability of 99.5% with production running 365 days a year, 24/7. In the case of an issue, we’re contacted within five minutes and our systems are never down for more than two hours during migrations. We have high demands in terms of availability,” Jean-Luc Chassot tells us. We therefore had to offer our customer a solution that gave them high availability, boosted performance, and simplified infrastructure admin. The Elsa-Mifroma team is small, but responsible for the company’s entire IT throughout Switzerland.
SOLUTION.
A new storage infrastructure and virtualisation server that offers reliability and a solution that meets the expectations of the group was therefore the solution.
To meet our customer’s expectations, we proceeded in line with our Plan – Build – Run best practice. The PLAN phase consisted of analysing Elsa-Mifroma’s needs, taking into account their specialist limitations and existing system.
We therefore recommended an HPE Alletra Full-Flash solution to replace their HPE 3PAR SANs. Once our customer had accepted this proposal, we began designing the dedicated solution, the design and configuration subsequently approved by our partner HPE.
The BUILD phase was then supposed to be deployed as usual, but the reality was different. The current global situation complicated procuring the IT equipment—a situation we were well aware of and had planned accordingly! We had to move with a greater sense of urgency than we thought due to an outdated SAN that was reaching the limits of its capacity, but the timing was determined by the hardware supply issues. The Bechtle teams made the best of this extra time, taking all the necessary steps for a smooth deployment of the new infrastructure in advance. “This time was really used to prepare everything as well as train and inform our teams,” says
Jean-Luc Chassot. “As we were migrating from an old to a new system, we needed to set up a SAN and integrate our new clusters. The Veeam solution that Bechtle’s experts implemented in our previous infrastructure let us integrate the whole concept with ease. Multiple projects conducted by our partner Bechtle therefore dovetailed. The whole thing was planned almost six months in advance,
making the RUN phase merely a formality. Everything was set, Elsa-Mifroma’s IT teams had been trained and were ready thanks to a skills transfer, and our experts knew the project inside and out, meaning that migration went without a hitch.
Collaboration is healthy, pleasant, smooth, and professional. Bechtle’s experts are masters of their domain and are focussed on responding to demands and troubleshooting issues. The quality of their documentation, the skill transfer that virtually enabled me to operate independently, plus the reliability of our IT infrastructure are proof of this. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Bechtle Switzerland’s services, and I have been, especially to my colleagues in other production units at Migros.
Jean-Luc Chassot - Systems Administrator
BENEFITS.
“Today, Elsa-Mifroma is enjoying many benefits—high availability (more than demand), higher reliability and therefore more security for its IT teams. I need to ensure system reliability of 99.5%—this year we’ve achieved 99.8%!” rejoices Jean-Luc Chassot.
The biggest benefit of our spectacular new infrastructure is in time savings during the deployment of our new infrastructure thanks to Veeam solutions that Bechtle’s experts implemented for us, which allowed us to save so much time during migration. Simply put, there’s no comparison between this and our last migration.
We want it on record that we were so happy with the work Bechtle did for the deployment and commissioning of Veeam solutions. This solution allows us to have relatively high availability without interrupting our VMs during the move. Bechtle’s experts prepared the work very well so that the migration could be implemented as quickly as possible. That’s one of the benefits of having Bechtle as a partner—its IT teams work together. It’s extremely practical,” Jean-Luc Chassot tells us.
Last but by no means least, a further benefit thanks to the time saved is the impact on our daily business. “The system is reliable, very reliable. The fact that we’re relaxed and don’t have much to manage on a daily basis leads to higher productivity, fewer production losses and in fewer raw materials lost, entailing more end material for our production chain,” Jean-Luc Chassot concludes.