Challenge

As a large organization, with operations in different markets, Policolor’s IT infrastructure was significantly large. It included as many as 4 datacenters, 8 midrange storage systems, multi-vendor and multi-architecture servers environment and tens of switches and routers throughout their business centers.

The obvious challenge was to ensure that these devices functioned properly and efficiently together and, at the same time, to analyze whether there were potential ways to replace some of these devices with virtualization solutions. We looked to maximizing operational efficiency, while, at the same time, decreasing costs.

Implemented Solution

After discussions with our partners at Policolor, we decided on solutions that would maximize the performance of the existing IT infrastructure and simplify its operations and make it more flexible. The primary challenge at Policolor, in this case, was the complexity of the entire IT framework.

We proposed a system that ensured full-time monitoring and developed an Infrastructure Recovery Plan tailored to address IT systems continuity needs.

Challenge

Frequent end user platform failures had a negative impact on Policolor’s activity, significantly raising costs related to reprovisioning and minimizing overall operational productivity. This challenge was amplified by the geographic user distribution, determined by the company’s regional presence.

Policolor’s management wanted to implement a virtualization system to centrally manage end-user devices, operating system images, applications and user data. This system aimed to provide a flexible, reliable solution that would lower costs and time spent on desktop support. With this approach, ensuring higher availability and dynamically allocating resources to users would have been easier.

Another reason to support this initiative was the simplified Operating Systems image management, patch and application delivery with this approach. Deployments would be significantly faster, with far less images to manage due to the standard virtual hardware that the desktop operating systems would run from.

This type of approach also aligned with Policolor’s consistent strategy that supports energy sustainable development and with its overall vision of implementing green initiatives, considering lower overall power consumption.

Policolor’s aim was also to define roles within the organization, which would have regulated and better controlled employee access to resources.

Policolor’s management trusted Temperfield with taking over and implementing a virtualization solution that would cover all of their needs and requirements.

Implemented Solution

Temperfield proceeded with a full evaluation of the situation on the ground and proposed the architecture, implementation and project plan. We used a pyramid, bottom-up approach, whereby we started with installing and configuring the hardware (blades, network and storage), added a layer of virtualization and management components, following with an IT infrastructure services (AD, DHCP, DNS) and finalized with desktop virtualization components.

Our focus was on management control and employee accessibility, with proper monitoring. Temperfield paid attention to several relevant security aspects of the VDI infrastructure, to allow maximal performance in a secure environment.

We used VMware View Premiere, IBM blades, Fibre Channel attached IBM DS5000 and IBM Storwize V7000 storage systems as the main components in the architecture.

We worked with our client in order to contribute not only a punctual solution to the problem, but a streamlined structure targeting the IT infrastructure in the organization.