KHD reduces OPEX and simplifies global data centre management

“SimpliVity’s hyperconverged infrastructure solution helped us solve two significant issues – growing data center complexity and rising costs,” said Joerg Ludwig, chief information officer, KHD. “We were able to dramatically simplify our IT environment and management requirements, improve operational efficiencies, and significantly reduce our mounting operational expenses in our global data centers.”

Based in Cologne, Germany, KHD is a global organization with additional locations in India, China, Brazil and the United States. The Company is a global leader in cement plant technology, equipment and services. As KHD’s business has expanded globally, so has its data growth rates and challenges with its legacy IT infrastructure.

As cost and complexity increased, KHD sought help from Wipro Limited, a leading information technology, consulting and business services company and SimpliVity partner. Wipro introduced SimpliVity’s Data Virtualization Platform as the solution. KHD was impressed with SimpliVity’s ability to provide the economics and efficiency of the cloud, while keeping its data and applications on-premise with its simple, scalable, modular 2U OmniCube buildings blocks that are built on x86 commodity hardware.

SimpliVity’s hyperconverged infrastructure consists of OmniStack software, packaged into the 2U appliance called OmniCube. It provides two fundamental technological advances: data virtualization and global unified management at the VM-level. The Company’s Data Virtualization Platform offers deduplication, compression and optimization of all data inline, at inception, once and forever across all stages of the data lifecycle. As such, data efficiency rates are increased more than 100:1, dramatically improving data mobility and management locally – and crucially between remote sites.

SimpliVity’s hyperconverged infrastructure has also allowed KHD to increase operational efficiency globally, while eliminating the need to train staff on several management screens. Wipro first helped KHD address its data centre in India, where staff turnover and expenses were high — including the operational expense of continuously training and retraining staff on a growing stack of products. Germany, United States and Russia implementations followed. SimpliVity’s global unified management capability allows KHD to manage its resources from a central location, leveraging VMware vCenter, as a single “pane of glass”.

“Typically, the issue with the cloud is that it forces customers to give up capabilities in order to benefit from promises of cost reduction and business agility,” said Mitch Breen, senior vice president, global sales, SimpliVity. “With SimpliVity’s hyperconverged infrastructure, these trade-offs are eliminated and customers like KHD can realize the best of both worlds through x86 cloud economics with enterprise capabilities.”