Smooth Rides, Smoother IT: Transforming a Luxury Car Retailer’s Infrastructure

The Customer

Logicalis have a long-standing relationship with a Global Systems Integrator, and have worked with them on several of our key accounts. One of their customers, a high-profile British luxury car retailer, had outsourced most of their IT systems and Infrastructure many years ago. 

The Car Retailer wanted to implement an Infrastructure that makes better use of modern technology compared to their previous Managed Service.

The Challenge

Over the years, the oursourced IT systems and Infrastructure had become outdated and costly for the car retailer. Their provider did not maintain or optimise these systems, which led to further operational costs and outdated hardware. These systems were shared with other customers, and Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Plans (DR / BCP) were never fully tested, which caused concern. 

These factors, coupled with inflexible outage windows that didn’t align with the Car Retailer’s SLAs led them to migrate to a new Systems Integrator. If changes to their Infrastructure were not made, the Car Retailer’s production line and business could have been significantly affected. This is where the new Systems Integrator’s partnership with Logicalis came into play.

The Solution

Logicalis partnered with the new Systems Integrator and IBM to deliver a new and improved IT Infrastructure and Managed Service. This included:

•IBM Z15 Mainframe

•IBM DS8910F Enterprise all flash storage

•IBM TS7700 All disk Virtual Tape Libraries

•IBM POWER servers, new and refurbished to host legacy workloads

The project involved designing, planning, and implementing the new infrastructure, ensuring no outages to the customer’s systems and business. The environment was set up and operated in parallel for several months before switching over, which was not only a massive relief to the customer, but also meant that the DR / BCP functionality could be tested in a controlled way.

DS8000 storage replication was done over the network from the old, shared arrays to the new DS8910F technology. Virtual Tape Libraries were also migrated over the WAN, ensuring both disk and backup data were synchonised in both System Integrator Data Centres. This process helped the new System Integrator understand the environment better, identify areas for improvement, and optimise the mainframe estate. This not only led to reduced IBM Software costs, but also a reliable disaster recovery capability for our Partner’s customer.

The customer now benefits from an improved, optimised, and more cost-effective Managed Service. They are operating on high-performance, supported, and up-to-date hardware, with full DR / BCP capabilities.

The new Systems Integrator endorsed the migration as a major success for their partnership with Logicalis, leading to many more opportunities we are jointly working on.

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