Thanks to cloud infrastructure, Lundegaard gained the flexibility needed to develop its business
| Industries | IT services |
|---|---|
| Products | Geetoo Cloud Compute, Geetoo Private Cloud |
| Technology | VMware vSphere, VMware NSX, VMware vCloud Director |
Lundegaard, a company engaged in a wide range of services in the field of website creation and operation, faced limited options for flexibility and performance of its IT, and thus could not fully meet the demands of its customers or innovate its services. Therefore, it decided to completely change the operational model of its IT. It stopped using its own physical servers and, in collaboration with Geetoo, a cloud provider and VMware partner, decided to transition to an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model and move its infrastructure to a private cloud. Thanks to the VMware solution, Lundegaard acquired a highly available environment with easy management and, above all, high scalability.
Challenge
Lundegaard’s vision is to expand and streamline its customers’ business through internet and mobile technologies. However, the company itself began to realize that its existing IT infrastructure based on physical hardware did not provide the performance and flexibility needed to innovate and grow its own business. Lundegaard first decided to solve this problem by virtualizing leased physical servers. However, the diverse infrastructure consisting of hardware elements of different type, age and performance, despite the use of virtualization, faced a lack of flexibility, and the management of the entire environment was very complicated. IT administrators had to spend unnecessary time on managing the physical infrastructure instead of developing the company’s IT environment.
Another challenge was the very nature of Lundegaard’s business. In addition to developing and testing websites, the company also provides web hosting services to some of its customers. Smaller ones use a shared infrastructure and customers from large companies are assigned their own virtual data centre. Therefore, Lundegaard needed a solution that would help increase the flexibility of its infrastructure, simplify management and allow it to scale its resources unrestrictedly in response to the changing business requirements of its clients.
“In 2016, we came to the conclusion that we needed to change the entire operating model of our IT and move towards an IaaS (infrastructure as a service) model, i.e. to completely move away from the perception of the physical part of the infrastructure and work with a purely virtualised infrastructure.”
Benefits
- Cost optimisation
- Increased flexibility
- Securing data
- Saving time
- Increase in performance
- Moving physical HW to the cloud
“With VMware vSphere 6.5 virtualization, we have more flexibility in creating dedicated server environments compared to our previous use of physical servers, including scaling up or down capacity as clients’ actual needs change over time.”
Solutions
Geetoo, a cloud provider and VMware partner, was chosen as the partner from which Lundegaard will lease the infrastructure. The company has tried other cloud platforms in the past, namely Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, but was convinced by Geetoo’s price/performance ratio as well as its proactive customer approach and quality of service. Based on Lundegaard’s requirements and needs, the most suitable solution was to move the infrastructure to a private cloud.
The company’s infrastructure is now operated within three virtualized data centers using VMware products, namely VMware vCloud Director, VMware vSphere 6.5 and VMware NSX. The solution provides customers with a clear user interface to control their virtual data centres. One of Lundegaard’s requirements was a certain degree of autonomy in the management of its data centre.
“Although we use IaaS, we still prefer self-service within the solution, which was one of the reasons we chose Geetoo and VMware. vCloud Director has a clear interface that provides detailed information about the entire data center and allows us to perform common service tasks independently without having to take a complicated trip through the customer service line.”
Within the private cloud, the company operates all the server infrastructure needed to implement operational services for its customers, i.e. web hosting. Some (smaller) customers use a shared infrastructure, while the larger ones have their own dedicated infrastructure within a separate virtual data centre. At the same time, the company operates its internal IT infrastructure in the cloud, i.e. the systems necessary for Lundegaard to function as an organisation. These include collaboration systems, server applications to support development and deployment, and more.
Conclusion
The new cloud solution helped eliminate the problem of a complicated and outdated IT infrastructure based on obsolete hardware while significantly improving the performance of the entire environment. Lundegaard is now able to scale its resources according to customer requirements and the market situation, which is crucial for this company given the nature of its business, where the volume of work and the capacity required changes dynamically depending on the individual projects. Lundegaard can now guarantee its customers high availability and a stable, secure environment in line with modern IT requirements.
A great advantage is the management of the entire environment. Whereas previously individual physical servers had to be serviced, today IT administrators have unified access through the VMware vCloud Director interface. Here they can control and view the individual components of the infrastructure as a whole. In addition, they spend significantly less time managing IT infrastructure thanks to advanced automation features. vCloud Director offers a clear and advanced role-based management feature so individual customers can access their environment without impacting or compromising the rest of the infrastructure, even if they share a single virtual data center.
About the customer
Lundegaard was founded in 1998 and provides web integrator services. It provides a full range of services – from design, development and testing of web portals and applications to web hosting and administration. The company has a total of three branches in the Czech Republic, one in Slovakia and one in Germany, employs over 80 people and already has over 280 customers on the Central European market.
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