For telecommunications companies like Serbian public utility organization JKP Informatika, stable and efficient IT operations, ransomware protection, and the ability to evolve with the quickly changing landscape are imperative.
Established 40 years ago, JKP Informatika Novi Sad provides telecommunications, utility, and household billing services. The organization manages the city’s (Novi Sad) General Information System and core databases comprising personal and business records and works to evolve the city’s digital transformation. When it came time for JKP Informatika to modernize their current infrastructure and level up security for their core databases, based on previous positive experiences with VMware, they knew exactly which solutions to turn towards.
Outdated Infrastructure Leads to Outages and Vulnerability
As IT infrastructures and systems are the pulse of Informatika’s business and digital operations of the city they serve, the company must ensure their service is accessible in a timely and reliable manner. However, as the digital landscape continues to evolve rapidly and their technologies became outdated, their services became prone to outages and vulnerable to threats with slow recovery.
Previous use of VMware vSphere led Informatika to choose VMware to modernize their infrastructure as the most logical and cost-effective solution. In leveraging HCI powered by VMware vSAN and vSphere, Informatika was not only able to simplify operations and eliminate downtime, but they were also able to future-proof infrastructure and for added resilience with vSAN.
Upgraded Infrastructure Leads to Resilience and Reduced Complexity
The implementation took place in tandem with Serbian systems integrator, Braineering. Under their guidance, Informatika deployed a hyperconverged infrastructure solution based on vSphere and vSAN across a stretched (metropolitan) cluster with two primary data centers and one in an alternative location. The HCI infrastructure powered by vSAN and vSphere supports over 300 VMs on a total of 10 servers with over 10,000 end users. The systems also leverage vSphere vMotion to automatically migrate from one site to another and VMware Site Recovery Manager to recover locations should any collapse. Lastly, their new vSAN architecture lowered costs and replaced SAS and SATA drives with SSD and NVMe arrays to drastically speed up operations.
“Everything mission-critical now runs on vSphere and vSAN. The important thing is that we have everything on one server and do not have to make interconnections to external SAN devices. Overall, we are happy with the solution and appreciate the prompt response from VMware and its partner to fix issues that may occasionally occur.”
Duško Novaković, Director Assistant For Information and Communication Technology JKP Informatika Novi Sad.
Informatika’s upgraded infrastructure has virtually eliminated downtime due to the introduction of the third site, which serves as a quorum. This means it keeps watch of the other two locations: should one fail, the other is automatically activated. This automatic failover improves the reliability and availability of the infrastructure. In addition, HCI has eliminated previous issues with network communication, and the 100% virtualized environment significantly enhances security.
Summary
Overall, Informatika’s systems are now more resistant to ransomware and disasters, improve operations, save time, and are cost-effective. The telecommunications company has further plans to maximize vSAN resilience and continue their adoption of VMware solutions to include NSX, SD-WAN, and additional vSphere automation.
View the full JKP Informatika case study here.
Learn how vSAN has empowered other organizations here.
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