Looking at the IT infrastructure at several production sites within my customer’s organization, we quickly noticed IT infrastructure components (mainly compute and storage related) that were not up to par from an availability and performance perspective. The production sites all run local business critical ERP application workloads that are vital to the business processes. After researching and discussing a lot, I proposed my customer a new blueprint. The blueprint consists of a new compute and storage baseline for the site local datacenters. The idea was to create a platform that allows for a higher availability and more performance while reducing costs.
We researched the possibility to step away from the traditional storage arrays and move towards a Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) solution. Because IT is not the main business of the company, we were trying to keep things as simple as possible. We defined several ‘flavors’ to suit each production location to its needs. For example, the small sites will be equipped with a ROBO setup, the medium sites with a single datacenter cluster and the large factories are presented a stretched cluster solution. A stretched cluster setup will allow them to adhere to the stated availability SLA in the event of a large scale outages on the plant for their most important applications that do not offer in-application clustering/resiliency.
Benefits
Since my customer is running VMware solutions in all of its datacenters, VMware vSAN was the perfect fit. It allows the customer to lean on the already in-house VMware knowledge while being able to move towards less FTE for managing the storage backend. Implementing stretched clusters on multiple sites using storage arrays can be a daunting task. And although there are prerequisites, implementing VMware vSAN is implemented fairly easy, even if you opt for a stretched cluster configuration. This allowed for very short time from the moment of receiving hardware to a fully operational vSphere and vSAN cluster. Because the customer is in the process of renewing its IT infra for a number of sites, it really helps to tell the business we can deliver within weeks rather than months.
Using the VMware vSAN ready nodes allowed us to exceed the required storage capacity and performance requirements while being more cost efficient in comparison to traditional storage arrays. As management loves lowered costs, both capex and opex, HCI was the way to go. From a manageability point-of-view, it is a big plus that all VMware datacenters and (vSAN) clusters are managed from a centralized VMware vCenter UI. Another plus was the savings in rack units as those are scarce in some site-local datacenters.
