Modernization of IT infrastructure supported the continuity of ZLKL's business

ZLKL offers its customers a wide range of engineering activities. Specifically, these include machining, pressing, welding, surface treatment, 3D quality control, as well as development and design. Thanks to its complexity, quality, ability to respond quickly to client requirements and affordable prices, it has been growing in sales and number of employees for a long time. ZLKL mainly supplies multinational concerns such as Emerson and Siemens.

Approximately 60% of production is exported, the main markets after the Czech Republic are France and Germany. Most of the products are used in the electrical industry, water industry and automotive industry. The company's primary aim is to meet the requirements, preferences and needs of its customers. This enables them to handle deliveries quickly, flexibly and with first-class quality.

ZLKL used one hardware server for the operation of all IT applications, which was no longer sufficient for the company's rapid development not only in terms of its performance and capacity, but above all it became an operational risk due to its irreplaceability. Similarly to the server, other parts of the infrastructure were also becoming obsolete, especially the WiFi network and the firewall.

It was therefore necessary to prepare the development of the key IT infrastructure to meet the requirements of ZLKL's development. In particular, it was necessary to implement a robust, powerful and reliable server infrastructure covering the current and future requirements for running key company applications. Furthermore, emphasis had to be placed on the development of WiFi coverage in the production areas to replace the already insufficient system. The company also required to increase the security of the entire IT system in addition to speeding up the logistics chain. This involved replacing the existing firewall, reimplementing backup processes and hardening the IT infrastructure setup.

The newly implemented server infrastructure consisted of two physical HPE servers with modern AMD server processors, ample memory and fast SSD disk space. The redundancy and redundancy of the servers was solved by using a virtual SAN infrastructure in which data is stored simultaneously on both servers, directly on their local disk space, which is mirrored. Thus, in the event of a failure of any HW server, there is no data unavailability and the affected application virtual servers are restarted on the other server within moments.

The project also includes an equally important part of the LAN, through which not only users access applications, but servers communicate with each other. Most of the access switches have been replaced and new core switches equipped exclusively with 10Gbit SFP+ ports have been deployed.

For the development of Industry 4.0 technologies, it was necessary to ensure adequate WiFi signal coverage to connect technology and IoT devices to the LAN. Therefore, the subject of the project was to further build this coverage both in the existing production areas and in the newly built halls. In order to meet the customer's requirements, we used modern Aruba access points compliant with the WiFi 6 standard.

To improve logistics processes, we also used a wireless system based on ZEBRA readers. An integral part of any IT project is also taking care of the security of the entire IT system. This project involved replacing the firewall with a more powerful and modern type and reimplementing the backup scheme to bring everything up to current requirements.