Continuing on the theme of the cloud management success from our customers across the globe, today I’d like to share with you the story of Insight Enterprises. Insight Enterprises is a Fortune 500-ranked global provider of hardware, software, cloud and service solutions. Companies come to Insight for help with making better decisions with technology. In other words, Insight helps their clients find the right intelligent technology solutions to help them run smarter.
So, where does the Insight IT team go to modernize their own cloud infrastructure? Watch the Insight video here, or keep reading for more details!
Insight came to VMware, and here is why: in the words of Carlos Sotero, Insight’s global IT director responsible for data center services,
“VMware provides the foundation that we need across the board to work efficiently and consistency so that we can provide the quality of service and applications that our customers expect.”
The Environment
Insight has a 95% virtualized infrastructure, and they run about 2,000 VMs over 338 hosts. Mix of OS is about 70% Windows, 30% Linux, a bit of UNIX as well. This complex environment is hosting a number of mission-critical applications driving Insight’s IT Solutions business. The users, 6,000+ of Insight’s employees as well as the distributed partner/vendor community, have been asking for more stability in existing IT services, reduced turn-around time for infrastructure requests, and increased flexibility to meet new demands.
The Selection Process and the Requirements
Being a global provider of IT solutions that help clients manage and transform their business, Insight knows the landscape of enterprise software like nobody else out there. They approached VMware to provide a comprehensive SDDC solution. The key decision making points have been:
- The proven EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution based on best of breed hardware and software infrastructure
- VMware suite of cloud management tools is easy to install, allowing Insight to benefit from value faster.
- Availability of EMC and VMware professional services, who would step in to install everything while allowing the internal Insight IT team to focus on their day-to-day activities
The Cloud Management Solution
Specific to VMware cloud management tools, Insight has decided to deploy the entire spectrum of vRealize products and beyond:
- vRealize Automation – for IT automation and self-service delivery portal
- vRealize Operations – for intelligent operations of the hybrid cloud
- vRealize Log Insight – for logs management and analytics
- vRealize Business for Cloud – for business analytics and services cost management
All that is working with close conjunction with VMware NSX virtual network, and is based on vSphere Enterprise Plus 6.0 hypervisor. The overall solution is deployed with the framework of Dell EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud which provides the proven foundation for deploying and operating enterprise-grade hybrid cloud environment.
The Benefits and the Future Direction
The benefits already seen by Insight are significant. According to Carlos, Insight IT now can deliver projects 2-4 weeks faster through automated infrastructure provisioning. Provisioning new VMs takes minutes rather than days. They have also reduced the reconfiguration time by 75% by utilizing infrastructure provisioning blueprints in vRealize Automation, and are providing better IT services to all stakeholders while seeing 116 fewer incident tickets each month (with the help of vRealize Operations). Overall, they are seeing reduced costs of operations from increased utilization of existing hardware assets, and that includes both compute and network resources.
Based on the results of this initial deployment, Insight IT is eyeing future expansion of the platform. One of the potential opportunities they see, for example, is migrating their ERP application from RISC-based platforms to x86 virtualization. They are looking into expanding their Enterprise Hybrid Cloud for that initiative, and get the automation and orchestration to make their ERP more agile, thus directly impacting and improving their revenue steam. More on that in the future!
View the Insight case study video here
