KHD achieves best of both: cloud benefits and enterprise capabilities
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Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- Europe
- America
- Asia
Country
- Germany
- Brazil
- China
- India
- Russia
- United States
Product
- HPE SimpliVity
Tech Stack
- Hyperconverged Infrastructure
- Data Virtualization
- VMware vCenter
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Applicable Industries
- Cement
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
About The Customer
KHD is a global leader in cement plant technology, equipment, and services with over 155 years of experience in the cement industry. The company offers a wide spectrum of products and aftermarket services for the cement industry and is a leader in energy-efficient and environmentally friendly products for the grinding and pyroprocessing sections of cement plants. In addition to its high-quality product offering, the technology-focused group includes process engineering and project management among its core competencies. KHD is headquartered in Cologne, Germany, and has locations in India, Russia, China, Brazil, and the United States. As KHD’s business has expanded globally, so has its data growth rates and challenges with legacy IT infrastructure.
The Challenge
KHD, a global leader in cement plant technology, equipment, and services, was facing challenges with its legacy IT infrastructure. The company's data growth rates were increasing, and the costs associated with managing this data were also on the rise. The complexity within the data center was growing, with the need to deploy numerous different deduplication, compression, and optimization appliances to keep up with data growth and the performance requirements of enterprise applications. The increasing capital costs for added storage, compute, various appliances, and software licensing were a concern. Additionally, operational expenses were mounting as administrators were spending countless hours on menial maintenance tasks instead of focusing on innovation to drive the business forward. In certain countries, where staff turnover rates are typically high, the lack of trained IT resources was impacting growth. KHD needed a new solution, based on a fundamentally new data architecture.
The Solution
KHD implemented HPE SimpliVity, a hyperconverged solution that provided the efficiency and agility of the cloud, improved IT productivity, and lowered total cost of ownership while maintaining enterprise capabilities. HPE SimpliVity provided KHD with the cost and efficiency of the cloud, while keeping its data and applications on-premise with its simple, scalable, modular 2U buildings blocks built on x86 commodity hardware. The solution offered two fundamental technological advances: the data virtualization and global unified management at the VM level. The Data Virtualization Platform offered deduplication, compression, and optimization of all data inline, at inception, once and forever across all stages of the data lifecycle. This improved KHD’s disaster recovery capabilities and eliminated the need for separate WAN optimization products. All HPE SimpliVity resources globally could be managed from a central location, from a single pane of glass, VMware vCenter. This reduced the number of products for which the IT staff needed to be trained.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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