Companies today rely on business-critical applications and an ever-increasing stream of data to power success. And as workforce mobility becomes a competitive necessity across industries, these applications and their data must be responsive and accessible from any device at any location. That increases the strain on data centers and makes efficiency a priority for overstretched IT teams.
velcom, a leading telecommunications provider in Belarus, knows these challenges firsthand. The enterprise is expanding internationally by acquiring regional competitors and building new service offerings. That approach requires the rapid integration of acquisitions and increased IT efficiency to manage a growing infrastructure while restraining costs. The aim of its IT department is a more agile business with simplified IT management that allows for the faster deployment of new services.
“VMware technologies meet the highest requirements of the market [and] offers the greatest opportunities compared to the competition. We now have a full stack of VMware products,” Anton Lushchikov, Head of the Infrastructure Development and Operations Department, velcom
Infrastructure Efficiency = Less Time Maintaining & More Time Innovating
That’s why velcom turned to VMware Hyperconverged Infrastructure powered by VMware vSAN. Easy to operationalize and secure, VMware HCI offers high availability between clusters to ensure the business continuity needed by an always-on telecoms provider. And as data storage needs increase, vSAN automatically pursues space reclamation to provide even greater efficiencies within the data center. When the time comes to add capacity, scaling is similarly straightforward; servers can be spun up in hours and not days. This allows IT professionals to spend less time on hardware maintenance and more on developing new services.
Flexibility is another important attribute of VMware vSAN, and in fact, “the vSAN software-defined storage solution was chosen because it is the most flexible,” says Anton Lushchikov, Head of the Infrastructure Development and Operations Department for velcom. That flexibility stems from its native integration with the VMware vSphere virtual infrastructure. velcom had previously deployed VMware vSAN to classic storage hardware but by introducing vSphere, the organization could flexibly adjust policies relating to the fault tolerance speed of virtual machines. vSAN for ROBO’s per-virtual machine licensing model provides a different type of flexibility, allowing velcom to reduce overall expenditures by minimizing the cost of smaller infrastructures at remote offices.
Effortlessly Integrate and Manage Remote Offices
velcom’s remote offices use vSAN to support its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, which standardizes employee work stations and enables the effortless integration of acquisitions into existing infrastructure. velcom acquisitions are equipped with a local VMware vCenter and managed centrally from a single point. That has allowed Velcom to simplify device management across operations and deliver a consistent user experience for mobile working.
“Before, we needed to prepare a fairly complex infrastructure on a local level, whereas now, we only need a communications line in the store after which users can connect to the data center and launch sessions in the virtual desktop infrastructure,” says Lushchikov.
vSAN’s clear benefits overcame initial skepticism from both engineers and management. “After we showed them that the cost of the vSAN was considerably lower than the hardware component we previously used in the company, the management’s skepticism simply disappeared. Then, after the introduction of vSAN and once we were operational, any mistrust on the part of classic storage administrators almost completely dissipated.”
Together with the full stack of VMware products that velcom also employs, vSAN has strengthened velcom’s position in the market, allowing them to open “a new store in any location in the country pretty quickly” and providing a significant competitive advantage.
For more on velcom’s story, check out this case study and also watch Lushchikov discuss the power of vSAN in conjunction with other VMware products like Horizon 7 and vSphere 6.7.
