Deployment of reliable and robust infrastructure for JEDNOTU, consumer cooperative in Boskovice

The customer JEDNOTA, consumer cooperative in Boskovice is, as the name implies, mainly engaged in the retail sale of food of everyday consumption. The main products are sausages, baked goods, dairy products, beverages and fruit and vegetables. Even for this type of customer, it is important to have a stable infrastructure to avoid unexpected outages that would unpleasantly jeopardize business.

The customer owned an infrastructure that had support at the edge of life. It was a private cloud solution and the technology had been deprecated to support the SDS tool. So the goal was to deliver and deploy a reliable, robust and highly available infrastructure that would provide for the customer's needs for at least the next 5 years. An important objective was also to quickly migrate the existing environment without major disruption to the operation of the stores.

At JEDNOTA, we have been a service and technology partner for over 20 years and so the customer turned to us with the design requirement - a comprehensive solution was required from design, implementation to subsequent management.

We were choosing between a cloud and hyper-converged solution. The customer was assessing the order at the level of their IT from a technical perspective (especially availability, capacity and performance) and at the level of the economic department, where financing in the form of an operating lease was considered.

Based on the results of customer consultation meetings with our specialists, the Dell VxRail hyperconverged platform in conjunction with VMware vSAN was selected as the ideal solution. We chose Dell VxRail because of the requirements for maximum stability of operation and because of our many years of experience with this technology.

The implementation of the solution went smoothly thanks to professional IT teams in Brno and Boskovice. During the six months of work, both teams cooperated perfectly. While the Brno specialists dealt exclusively with the initial connection and commissioning of the new infrastructure alongside the old one, colleagues from Boskovice took care of the smooth migration of data from the old solution to the new one. The biggest challenge for us and the customer was the right timing. Since Jednota has more than 100 stores and one wholesale store, the implementation had to be done without jeopardizing the operation of the branch network.

The whole project, including the delivery of all hardware, took almost half a year. After a few months of operation, the customer now runs a modern data centre without the slightest complication. The biggest shift for the customer has been in increased reliability of operation, availability of important business processes and getting a complete overview of all critical sites in one point. Our central monitoring services under the service contract also contribute significantly to all this.