Technology Services maps future IT strategy for ALPLA

Page 3
Case study
ALPLA
Industry
Manufacturing
“Previously, IT told the organization which
systems they could use. Now business is even
more aligned with IT.”
The workshops established a long-list of
more than 100 topics to be addressed,
grouped into 15 themes. The process
clarified several objectives:
• Centralize services where possible,
consolidate globally
• Improvement in email uptime
• Proactive monitoring of system
performance, including regional
management of servers
• Consistent helpdesk support
• Secure backup for Business
Continuity Management
• Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
requiring new, redundant data centers
• Create new set of Service Level
Agreements (SLAs).
“Email is the biggest concern for users. If mail
is oline we’ll lose a lot of money, it’s that
simple,” says Berchtold. “How much is hard to
say, but we need to close a deal, fix a price or
make a market intervention at any given
moment, anywhere in the world. If email is
down it has an impact on our daily operation.”
With bringing up Microsoft System Center
Operations (SCOM) and HPE Systems Insight
Manager we’re now able to proactively
identify issues in our IT environment and
investigate instead of doing stu reactively.
Local, tape-based backups were also
found to be ineective, leaving business
continuity exposed. “We had too many bad
experiences,” says Berchtold.
“Tapes not being replaced and tapes being
not kept in a standardized place. We needed
to remove backup from the local plant.”
Benefits
Replace, consolidate, centralize
With HPE uncovering the weak points in
ALPLA’s IT infrastructure, and the findings
fed back to management, that pressure,
long absent, was now evident. “Doing
everything in one go would be too much
for us. We needed HPE to put it all together,
to have a consolidated view of all domains
and a step-by-step project approach to
realize the whole program and make sense
of the project. This wouldn’t have been
possible using dierent specialists for
each domain,” says Berchtold.
As the project plan was put in place, HPE
began work on proof-of-concepts. The first
task was to replace and consolidate server
hardware at branch locations. In place of 140
local servers, two new, high-availability data
centers were built in Austria and Germany,
30km apart, to host centralized services
including a Microsoft Exchange server. This
solved ALPLA’s email issues and provided
always-on access to email, calendars and
contacts, regardless of device or location.