Struggling to manage five data centers across different US regions, one of the largest tire and rubber manufacturers in the world consolidated data centers, reduced infrastructure waste, and saved $160,000 in monthly costs.
Our client is a leading tire and rubber-related products manufacturer. From commercial automobile and aircraft tires, to building and industrial materials, they develop and distribute rubber and tire products to more than 150 countries around the world.
The data center consolidation and migration project was executed two months ahead of schedule, more than $13,000 under budget, and with zero disruptions to operations. Five data centers were consolidated into the enterprise data center, leading to substantial cost savings and business benefits, including:
The client is no longer hindered by operational inefficiencies, high operating costs, and poor data center performance. They are instead free to effectively compete on the global stage and continue their manufacturing legacy spanning nearly a century.
Our client is a subsidiary of the largest rubber and tire company in the world. With more than 50,000 employees, they have been serving the automotive market across the globe for nearly a century. With five data centers across the US, they struggled with redundant and underutilized infrastructure, inconsistent IT service delivery, and IT staff working from different processes and procedures at each site.
They partnered with David-Kenneth Group on a large-scale project with the goal of consolidating four data centers and moving operations to an enterprise data center. In addition to consolidation, they needed to reduce their infrastructure footprint, modernize infrastructure, merge services, streamline IT services, and create a consolidated support model for IT staff.
On a tight project timeline, our team was tasked with identifying operational inefficiencies, developing a strategy for improving data center performance, consolidating four data centers, and migrating to a fifth data center that was undergoing a major renovation.
Our client’s data centers stretched from the southern United States to the Midwest. Each of the five data centers operated independently and had their own process, procedures, and methods of operating. Knowledge about applications, devices, and servers was limited to a handful of IT staff at each site, causing an information gap that negatively impacted operations. In many cases, the information was either not properly documented or not documented at all, further compounding the information gap.
Additionally, they were spending an exorbitant amount of money powering and cooling physical devices, many of them redundant or unneeded. Without a clear understanding of what physical inventory was critical to IT service delivery, our client also spent an excess amount of its operating budget on unnecessary assets.
Operational inefficiencies, combined with high operating costs and poor data center performance, limited their ability to remain competitive. They needed to significantly reduce their infrastructure footprint and modernize to reduce their total cost of ownership and to improve the availability, performance, and flexibility of IT services.
The critical goals of the consolidation project were to reduce waste by eliminating redundant infrastructure and to execute the project without disrupting business operations. To do so, our team needed a 360-view of all assets and dependencies. We began by monitoring their operating environments in real-time using an auto-discovery tool.
Next, we executed a manual discovery effort, conducting onsite inventories and gathering human intelligence about their operating environment that was non-discoverable by machines. Together, auto-discovery and manual discovery provided insights into system and application dependencies while updating their CMDB.
All four source data centers were migrated into the enterprise data center through both virtual and physical migrations. Thousands of physical devices were either migrated, consolidated, or retired, eliminating waste from redundant and underutilized infrastructure. By upgrading their facilities, we reduced the number of universal power supplies needed to power the data centers, resulting in a significant reduction in power and cooling costs.
Consolidated IT staff were successfully integrated into the newly modernized enterprise data center and now work from an updated CMDB with clean data. With newly documented processes, procedures, and support requirements for applications, knowledge-sharing improved among IT staff and resulted in faster IT service delivery. Other project results included:
Consolidation led to the elimination of redundant, unused, and nonoperational infrastructure. Overall, we reduced our client’s physical infrastructure footprint by 88 percent, migrating 398 devices and decommissioning more than 1,000.
Consolidating 5,400 square feet of data center space led to $110,000 in monthly savings. Power and cooling costs were reduced by 89 percent and resulted in more than $50,000 in monthly savings.
With high performance, flexible, and available data center services, our client now serves its employees and customers with an IT infrastructure designed for efficiency, agility, and speed. With a celebrated history of delivering products to customers around the globe, our client is positioned to remain at the top of its industry now and in the future.
