EMULSA
Supply, installation, commissioning and support service of a virtualisation solution
The project
EMULSA had a server virtualisation platform in its data processing centre that housed its IT systems. In 2021, the hardware of this platform was reaching the end of its useful life and needed to be migrated to a new, more up-to-date environment that would also improve performance and cover EMULSA's processing needs and allow for future scalability and improvement without compromising service quality.
Meeting this need, EMULSA required a project that integrated the supply of the latest generation servers and storage cabinets, the implementation work for the migration of the machines to the renewed environment without interrupting the service to the users, the high availability configuration and the configuration of a backup and disaster recovery system, as well as the maintenance service and technological support for subsequent years.
Challenges
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Migrating its IT infrastructure in a reduced time slot -
Re-using previous infrastructure as backup and disaster-recovery -
Providing response times of 1 hour to critical incidents
The solution
Izertis, as a Dell EMC Gold Partner, proposed to EMULSA an architecture based on Dell servers and storage, which in addition to meeting and even exceeding the requirements specified by the client, allowed EMULSA to take advantage of its current VMWare licensing, guaranteeing maximum integration of the virtualisation software with the hardware thanks to the VMWare "Custom images" for Dell, optimising the total cost of ownership (TCO) for EMULSA.
Over the course of 2 months, Izertis carried out the supply and installation of the new servers in EMULSA's data processing centre, with the two entities working closely together to define the optimum configuration of the equipment to cover EMULSA's real processing needs, as well as the controlled migration of the virtual machines and the storage system to the new high-availability environment, without impacting the service at any time, thanks to, among other factors, an exhaustive testing and contingency plan both prior to and after the migration.
As part of the transition process, Izertis gave different training sessions (infrastructure, storage, backup platform, monitoring, etc.) to EMULSA technicians for the management of the environment and migration of other servers to the new platform.
For the maintenance of this new infrastructure, Izertis, in addition to having the guarantee and support of Dell, provided EMULSA with access to its Managed Services Centre (the integral support and delegated administration service for the IT infrastructure of our clients in both corrective and evolutionary plans).
The result
In this way, EMULSA is able to renew its data processing centre, not only with an increase in capacity, but also with the flexibility to add new nodes in the future, allowing for horizontal scalability as its needs increase.
The designed solution also allows the previous processing and storage equipment to be reused as an additional backup and disaster recovery solution, making the new high-availability infrastructure an even more robust solution without additional investment on the part of EMULSA.
All of this was undertaken in a transparent migration process for end-users, who at no time saw any reduction in services, which was a key objective given that this is a public service of vital importance to citizens.
No less important is having been able to maintain the same virtualisation and data replication software that the EMULSA technicians had been using, conveniently updated by Izertis together with the training sessions, which reduced the learning curve for the effective operation of the new platform over the next few years, accompanied by Izertis support for its correction and evolution.