Efficiency is business critical

The internal IT department must ensure that employees can do their work as efficiently as possible. Stefan de Geus, IT Consulting Lead internal IT department at Hexagon: “As an internal IT department, we focus our services on the enterprise systems in the EMEA region. We manage the systems that are necessary to continue to conduct business operations, such as the financial (ERP) system. All branches in this region use the services that we offer from the Netherlands, which makes it business-critical that the IT works efficiently.”

Previously, Hexagon used twelve separate servers to provide its internal IT services. For the test and development street, twice that number was used. De Geus: “We had to buy a new system every time a system reached the end of its lifespan. This had to be more efficient.” Hexagon asked Dell Technologies how it could consolidate all its systems into a cluster, including shared storage. Partner IT creation was called in for this.

Apply Live Optics

IT creation performed a number of Live Optics measurements to discover how much performance the environment requires. Live Optics is a tool to measure and analyze the workload data of storage, servers, data protection and files. Based on these analyses, IT creation can put together an optimal configuration that meets all requirements. De Geus: “IT creation showed us various options and in the end we chose the PowerStore 1000T because this was the most (cost)efficient solution. A solution from another supplier was three times as expensive. The PowerStore 1000T is used for both the ALI and SIG divisions.

Hexagon has many small offices where there is no IT staff but IT equipment must be present. The company wanted to consolidate and concentrate this in the Hexagon data center in the Netherlands – and where possible make offices completely serverless. The demand for data storage within the data center also increased. De Geus: “It was mainly about the storage of fairly static data, without speed requirements. You don't put that on such a nice device as the PowerStore, that's a waste.” That's why Hexagon again sought advice from IT creation. Hexagon chose the PowerVault ME5012 because it could be connected to the same network layer as the PowerStore. De Geus: It could be seamlessly added to our cluster. Moreover, the management is simpler and more efficient.

Support and advice from IT creation

IT creation took care of the installation of the PowerStore 1000T. As a Dell Technologies Titanium partner, IT creation can also take care of the management, but Hexagon takes care of the daily management of its hardware itself. If there are complex challenges that Hexagon cannot solve, they can contact IT creation. De Geus says about this: “IT creation thinks along and gives advice on what best suits your needs and business operations. The management of a company always asks questions when a new solution has to be purchased.

De Geus: “IT creation thinks along with you and provides advice on what best suits your needs and business operations.

More speed in multiple areas thanks to the Powerstore

Hexagon experienced many benefits thanks to the PowerStore. According to De Geus, the solution is much faster than the previous one. With the Unity, the latency was around 4 to 5 milliseconds, with sometimes peaks of well over 10 milliseconds. The response of the PowerStore is ten times faster. This is generally at 0,5 milliseconds with sometimes peaks of 1 to 2 milliseconds. De Geus: “Every two months, a copy of the production environment and production data is forwarded to the development and test environment to optimize our internal business processes. Previously, that process took about 50 hours. With the PowerStore, this process is completed within 10 hours – it is certainly five times faster.”

Thanks to the deduplication built into the PowerStore, this is not a problem. De Geus: “You build the same test lane again. The new storage that is placed on the PowerStore hardly increases, because all duplicate data is removed. That is one of the great advantages of the PowerStore: it works faster and we can perform our tests more often.”

Another big advantage of deduplication is that Hexagon needs a lot less raw storage than before. The Unity had 50 disks, which was the maximum capacity. The PowerStore only uses 7 disks.

Colleagues from De Geus also notice that they can work faster and more efficiently than before. The performance of the ERP application has increased significantly. The start-up took a long time because the application is modular. After half a minute the interface was visible. After the implementation of the PowerStore, Hexagon immediately noticed that the start-up went much faster. Matching orders and invoices – which is a fairly intensive process – is also faster than before, as is opening reports in a browser.