VisilabGroup – Envisioning the future of IT.

Challenge.

The VisilabGroup were looking for a high-performance, reliable, but also flexible and scalable IT infrastructure for their shops. The challenge here was to simplify the processes by introducing a centralised solution into the data centres and therefore reducing the infrastructure at the remote sites. These data centre improvements saw the replacement of workstations with thin clients plus the simpler provisioning of new workstations and easier management of IT assets, in particular by standardising them.

Solution.

To be in a position to meet our customer‘s requirements, the Bechtle experts first carried out an assessment of the existing IT infrastructure using the Nexthink tool. The information gathered made it possible for us to determine the resources required and to scale the new solution so that it would best meet the needs of the customer. “Despite the restrictions in place because of the coronavirus crisis, the Bechtle teams showed great support and adapted to our needs”. A hyperconverged Dell VxRail infrastructure was recommended for implementation. After a needs analysis workshop, during which we could define the scope of services, technologies used, working methods and all specific details for the business applications, our experts collaborated with the Visilab team to design the perfect solution. The first step for the Bechtle teams was to inventory the existing infrastructure, before carrying out a technical analysis, which enabled us to get the necessary metrics for sizing the solution while also taking into account future growth.

With the information gathered on infrastructure requirements, we were able to determine the specifications for the VMware Horizon solution. Once this had been done, we presented the entire project to the VisilabGroup’s IT team for their sign-off. The Bechtle team followed the best practice plan, run, build approach. Once the planning stage had come to an end, the VxRail cluster was configured and delivered. Master and base images could be created and completely hardened after successful rollout and our engineers started to consider integrating business applications and automating them. All tests of the new VxRail infrastructure and the deployment of the VDI image supported by VMware Horizon were a complete success. This was followed by the integration of the VDI solution into the VisilabGroup’s production environment, completed with the support of the in-house technical teams. “Bechtle’s teams were extremely professional and flexible during the implementation of this project. It took longer than expected, but Bechtle knew what we wanted and their experts were very flexible in terms of project management and provisioning, which was very important especially against the backdrop of the coronavirus”, explains Marc Besson, CIO, VisilabGroup. In a final step, your experts kicked off the run phase so that all VisilabGroup employees could access the new IT services. Our engineers then trained the in-house IT team in the autonomous operation of their new environment.

Business Benefits.

“Thanks to our new future-ready IT infrastructure, we now have a modern and flexible architecture at our disposal that we can quickly implement across a large number of shops, which was a part of our group’s expansion strategy as a result of the takeover of McOptic. Our old infrastructure only allowed for rollout in one shop per month, but now we can do four a week! This saves us an enormous amount of time. We needed four months to implement the solution in our 62 stores—something that would have taken 18 months with our previous solution. We will also soon be able to roll this architecture out to all our Kochoptik stores in German-speaking Switzerland”, says Marc Besson, CIO, VisilabGroup.

Partenaires.