Finished:
Januari 2022
Category:
Service industry
Client:
Applus+
Less downtime and faster troubleshooting: Applus+ is ready for the future
Applus+ provides non-destructive testing (NDT), inspection and certification solutions worldwide in various sectors such as energy, infrastructure and shipping. The Dutch branch, Applus+ RTDwas founded in 1937 and was a pioneer in industrial radiography. In addition, Applus+ RTD develops inspection technologies, methods, applications, custom-made probes and they offer education and training. XCES helped Applus+ RTD with renovating their local data center in Rotterdam. We spoke with Arne Groenenberg, IT Systems Manager Northern Europe.
"I knew XCES from my previous employer," explains Groenenberg. "While I was working there, a core switch in the network crashed. We were able to get refurbished hardware from XCES quickly, and were back online the next day."
Applus+ RTD was also in great need of new hardware: before, the company used servers in their own local data centers, and all of the data went to a central datacenter in Madrid, where the company's headquarters are located. "In order to build up a national infrastructure as well, leftover hardware was placed in a local datacenter located at our Rotterdam offices. We had to work with 10-year-old equipment with blades, separate storage cabinets and cables," Groenenberg explains. "Because the components were all outdated, managing them quickly became a time-consuming chore for our IT department."
The right solution for terabytes of data
Applus+ RTD has 550 employees in the Netherlands. Because they work with large amounts of data, such as CAD drawings and 3D models, the right choice of storage was especially important. The new IT environment of Applus+ RTD consists of a combination of DataON-hardware, DataON S2D-5212, where the Intel servers are set up with a mix of NVMe as cache and normal hard disks as storage. Performance has improved drastically since the migration.
Groenenberg is pleased with the results:
"We now have far fewer components to manage, so we are saving a lot of time. The whole environment runs on Hyper-V with Microsoft solutions, and Windows Admin Center has made managing the infrastructure and devices a lot simpler."
Arne Groenenberg, IT Systems Manager Northern Europe
Better user experience and easier management
For Applus+ RTD, the collaboration with XCES turned out to be the right choice. The performance of the IT environment has improved and monitoring has become a lot easier: "It used to take us half a day to solve problems with a slow server, now it's just a matter of logging into Windows Admin Center and troubleshooting quickly and easily. Our experience, but also that of our end-users, is a lot more positive than before. Two days of consulting with XCES, and everything was up and running!"
