Retailer Sportisimo gets the opportunity to develop thanks to Geetoo Private Cloud
| Industries | Retail |
|---|---|
| Solutions | Geetoo Private Cloud |
| Technology | VMware vSphere, VMware vCenter, Veeam Backup, Replication VMware vCloud Director |
Sportisimo is a leading retailer of sports equipment, clothing and footwear. Due to problems caused by incompatibility and the age of the hardware in its datacenter, the company was unable to develop and innovate. It has therefore decided to move its entire infrastructure to a private cloud managed by Geetoo.
“By switching to Geetoo private cloud based on VMware technologies, we saved half a million crowns compared to buying hardware and running our own data centre.”
About the customer
Sportisimo is a leading retailer of sports equipment, clothing and footwear. It has been operating on the Czech market since 1999 and currently has around 100 brick-and-mortar stores in the Czech Republic and another 35 in Slovakia. Since 2015, the company has been offering its products in almost 30 other European Union countries. Sportisimo has won six Merchant of the Year awards.
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Like many other companies, Sportisimo has begun to experience the limitations and disadvantages associated with owning a physical IT infrastructure. The hardware in the company’s own data centre was becoming obsolete, and the three physical servers the company was using were no longer sufficient.
“Another big problem was the diversity of the environment in terms of age and type of hardware. This then caused problems when migrating to other hardware and hampered the performance of the entire infrastructure.”
The company’s management was forced to ask itself what direction to take its IT in next. Either to completely renew the hardware and spend considerable additional funds on its maintenance, operation and other necessary support, or to take the IaaS (infrastructure as a service) route and virtualize your data center through a cloud provider and start using a private cloud.
Benefits
- Cost reduction
- Power increase
- Streamlining IT operations
Decision making
Financially, the current model has proved uneconomic. In addition to the cost of hardware renewal, the cost of running the data centre itself had to be added, i.e. renting space, energy consumption, security, etc. In addition, the management of such a data centre requires considerable staff capacity and Sportisimo used an external company to maintain the hardware. The company’s management therefore decided that it would be more profitable to lease the infrastructure and use its own virtual servers.
At the same time, it was also a strategic decision, because as the pace of development in the field of information technology moves forward, the market situation and the requirements of customers, business partners and other stakeholders are changing. If a company wants to maintain its leading position in the market, it must have an IT infrastructure that is able to respond flexibly to the current situation and requirements and grow smoothly with the company.
Solution
At the beginning of 2017, the company decided to move to a private cloud and issued a tender, which was attended by the largest providers in the industry. Out of the eight shortlisted companies, three were shortlisted and in October 2017, Geetoo, a VMware partner using the latest VMware virtualization technologies, was selected as the most suitable partner. It won not only on the technological side, but also thanks to its friendly attitude, proactivity and, last but not least, on the financial side. The actual move of Geetoo’s infrastructure to the private cloud began in November 2017.
“Migrating our environment was even easier because we had already been using VMwarevSphere ourselves for several years within our own infrastructure. We just upgraded to the latest version of vSphere 6.5, which offers more features. The entire process of transitioning to the private cloud was smooth, without interruptions and during normal operation – we provided our customers with a complete portfolio of services even during the migration.”
As far as the environment is concerned, Sportisimo uses virtualized servers for running applications and for complete database operation. In spring 2018, the company also virtualized the complete test environment.
Sportisimo operates all its systems in the private cloud Geetoo – HR, payroll, financial, warehouse, ERP system and all reporting tools. The disk capacity of the environment is currently 22 TB of data.
In addition to the VMware vSphere 6.5 server virtualization solution, Sportisimo also uses the VMware NSX network virtualization solution. This guarantees full functionality and operation of all applications and systems used on any physical network infrastructure. The NSX architecture can handle network traffic up to 1 TB/s per cluster with 32 guests. The solution provides advanced automation, security and continuous application operation.
“Thanks to vSphere virtualization, we have also managed to radically increase the performance of the entire environment and increase its capacity, which, thanks to its high scalability, can be adjusted according to current needs, thus avoiding unwanted outages caused by overload, for example during Christmas shopping or seasonal sales.”
From the perspective of users and IT administrators, the transition to the private cloud has meant a significant simplification of work. VMware products have advanced features to diagnose and automate processes within the IT infrastructure, helping to improve security and continuity across the entire environment.
“The new cloud solution has largely relieved us of the workload in the form of routine tasks necessary to maintain the entire infrastructure. Access to individual systems was unified, processes were made faster and hardware support was eliminated. This allows us to devote our time to more innovative projects that take our IT infrastructure to the next level.”
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