Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 09 | Page 69

CASE STUDY V -TAB is one of the largest printing companies in the Nordic region with six production sites across the south and middle regions of Sweden. The organisation’s core business comes from national newspapers; however, its customers also include well-known magazines and business chains. The company is able to handle large capacity printing materials, but still endeavours to act as a creative partner to all of its clients, providing them with a bespoke and personalised service. As a comprehensive printing supplier, the company has well-established procedures for logistics, distribution and other postal services, as well as a complete photo studio that is open for client use. Challenge It is critical to the company’s success that its operations are supported by a robust IT environment that can meet high-capacity orders, offer complete business continuity and high-availability. The company was operating on a mixture of virtualised and non-virtualised environments, which had reached the end of its lifespan. The existing environment was six years old and V-TAB saw this as an opportunity to upgrade. Built on a core customer base of national newspapers, the company couldn’t afford to experience any downtime and the IT team required technology that was simple and easy to manage. Fredrik Bogårdh, IT Manager at V-TAB, commented: “Our clients rely on V-TAB to be a creative partner that can offer a quality, but speedy service. For this reason, we needed a solution that was simple to navigate and gave us improved high-availability and redundancy.” Searching for a new solution with Data Resilience With the help of its partner, Data Resilience, V-TAB evaluated the IT market extensively looking for a robust solution. Keen to eliminate the burden of data management, the company first considered outsourcing its I T requirements, however after further research, hyperconvergence become a clear choice. “When comparing hyperconverged solutions with the cost of outsourcing, the figures just didn’t match up and certainly didn’t point in the direction of outsourcing,” explained Bogårdh. IT REALLY IS AS SIMPLE AS PUTTING YOUR DATA IN THE CLOUD, BUT WITH ADDED CONTROL. “For this reason, we decided to opt for a hyperconverged solution that we could easily manage ourselves.” As a result, the company considered various options alongside Scale Computing. Bogård commented: “We were 100% committed to a hyperconverged platform and Scale Computing felt like the perfect choice. One of our core requirements was ensuring we could simplify IT management to save both time and money. We worked with our partner, Data Resilience, to ensure all of our IT requirements would be fulfilled and we have been extremely pleased right from the start.” Per-Ola Mård, Managing Director at Data Resilience, explained: “We are always looking to help customers meet their IT requirements and for V-TAB, it was essential www.intelligentcio.com INTELLIGENTCIO 69