IT Assessment & HCI Implementation for Enterprise Trucking Company

Client: A leading distributor of a truck, trailer chassis, and brake components since 1994, now grown into an aftermarket juggernaut. With four strategic distribution centers across the U.S. and several in Canada, this transportation company continues to expand its reach.

CHALLENGES

Derive’s client provides a wide assortment of critical components for the trucking industry, meaning that their business is essentially 24/7/365. During the summer of 2020, the firm was in the midst of migrating its headquarters to a new facility in New Jersey. It required not only relocating all existing IT equipment — much of it outdated or unsupported — but also a full update of their IT infrastructure.

Since its inception, the company had operated a traditional three-tier IT system that kept different technologies siloed:

• A computing platform on a cluster of outdated servers
• A storage platform with separate SSD and hard disk arrays
• A separate network platform with one switch to separate storage traffic from Ethernet traffic

Overall, an inefficient system is ripe for a refresh. The company was already working with a VAR partner. However, that resource lacked the expertise to manage and implement a new hyper-converged infrastructure. (Note: Also referred to as HCI, this refers to a software-defined and managed platform that merges major components of a traditional data center, such as computing, networking, storage, and system management capabilities.)

The old three-tier system created problems in terms of process and workflow visibility, along with company-wide performance issues. Other issues included expiring VMWare licenses and a shortage of dedicated IT staff.

System infrastructure management was overly time-consuming and increasingly difficult to support as more and more hardware and software components became obsolete. Overtaxed IT staff found themselves monopolized with patchwork repair efforts to keep existing systems functioning.

Lastly, the company needed to leverage a Prophet 21 ERP system to help automate some of their truck component distribution functions, so it was imperative that any solution that Derive recommended or implemented be able to host this specific application software.

GOALS

With only three dedicated individuals managing their IT department, the company needed to free itself from pure troubleshooting of an aging IT infrastructure. Goals included significant improvements in IT transparency, efficiency, and easy-to-use management tools to ensure the firm’s small IT team was as well-supported and productive as possible.

"An aging infrastructure increasingly forced a reactive IT management approach that prevented the firm from being agile and severely hampered the ability to handle future business demands."

Derive sought to understand and update critical data back- up processes, while simultaneously evaluating effective means of improving the IT team’s access to KPIs to enable the identification and correction of process inefficiencies. The IT team also needed free time for planning a technology roadmap that would accommodate future needs.

From Derive’s perspective, it was crucial that a consultative project management process be maintained to ensure requirements and objectives were all thoroughly identified and addressed. Once a firm initial understanding of the next steps was agreed to by all stakeholders, Derive would match the client with an in-house team of hyper-converged infrastructure experts, who would conduct a deep-dive assessment and manage the overall technology refresh project.

Strategic business objectives and business drivers would determine best-fit solutions that met both requirements and budget caps.

Amidst all goals, two items were imperative:

• The client had a budget cap that had to be respected
• None of Derive’s recommendations and actions could negatively impact the all-important operation of the Prophet 21 ERP system

PROCESS & HIGHLIGHTS

Derive began by establishing full transparency and openness. Rather than leading headlong with a generalized product and service recommendations, Derive first drilled down to understand and determine:

• Strategic and tactical business goals that would drive a specific technology roadmap
• Which technology tasks were most important to attack immediately and what could be assigned a lower priority
• Timeframes, budgets, and project scopes
• The involvement and responsibilities of key stakeholders, and the time commitments required of them

Derive is proudly brand-agnostic and represents many competing product and solution vendors, meaning clients can rely upon receiving an objective needs analysis accompanied by a set of solutions unrestricted by allegiance to particular hardware or software vendors.

Understanding how to best support this particular client began with “peeking under the hood,” so to speak, analyzing data workflows and workloads to identify problems and weaknesses; determining the best solution set was then possible.

Derive installed a sophisticated diagnostic tool in the firm’s data network to capture information over a week’s time. The clear environmental picture that emerged fed Derive’s assessment and analysis process. The next step was a validation meeting to present and explain findings, plus a discussion of the reasoning behind proposed solutions.

After assessment and discussion, Derive sought to remediate the following pain points:

• Replacement for aging hardware platforms
• Removal of outdated VMWare
• Facilitation of a full IT infrastructure migration to a new headquarters location
• Compensate for limited on-site company IT staff
• Ensuring platform compatibility with Prophet 21 ERP software
• Increased security

Derive recommended the following:

• Conversion to Nutanix hyper-converged platform
• HPE StoreOnce systems for heightened security
• Veeam for off-site data backup

Derive assigned a team of three expert engineers with various specialties: a lead architect who specialized in hyper-converged and hybrid data centers, an implementation engineer for the Nutanix HCI platform with particular expertise in new platform deployments, and a network engineer with specialty experience in Dell networking.

To ensure full Prophet 21 compatibility as well as absolute client peace-of-mind, Derive arranged a direct call with a Global VP at Nutanix to reassure the firm that Derives’s proposed hyper-converged infrastructure would be completely Prophet 21-compliant and provide specific industry references of similar successful implementations.

RESULTS

Following a successful project effort, the company’s hyper-converged infrastructure — which virtualizes the software-defined computing, networking, and storage assets of a conventional “hardware-defined” system — is now automated and much easier to manage.

With automation comes a far smaller need to spend time on regular system administration and day-to-day troubleshooting. The company’s Nutanix hyper-converged solution also has greatly reduced storage consumption by eliminating redundancies (de-duping data), streamlining backups, and increasing workflow efficiencies.

Derive removed all dependency on VMWare — data back-ups now take mere minutes rather than hours.

Perhaps most important for long-term confidence in the company’s ability to handle evolving business challenges, Derive proved they were not just another implementation vendor but rather a thoughtful, agnostic IT partner with highly flexible planning, project management, implementation, and support capabilities — a partner uniquely suited to assist in ensuring on-going business needs are satisfied.

For more information about Derive Technologies BOOK A FREE CONSULTATION  or contact us at marketing@derivetech.com or call +1 212-363-1111

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