Pentair Water Europe, a water management corporation based in Herentals, Belgium, was bursting at the IT seams. Through acquisitions and rapid growth, the company grew from four locations to 15 in just a few short years. Along with that major expansion came the tricky business of integrating disparate IT systems across Europe.
"We had a mixed server environment," says Johan Branders, the IT Infrastructure Manager for Pentair Water Europe. "Every acquisition had their own platform. We had Dell, HP—every vendor was represented." Eventually the company reached the point where they could not effectively manage this varied collection of devices, especially in locations where there was little to no IT presence. They decided to standardize on one vendor and made the switch to IBM. Belgian IBM Business Partner Core IT played a central role in the migration. Core IT recommended and assisted in the set up of the server consolidation and virtualization solution of IBM System x™ and IBM BladeCenter® servers running VMware ESX Server.
"We were looking for tools and technologies that would make it very easy for us to be flexible in integrating servers and services across Europe," explains Branders. "With the IBM hardware and VMware virtualization technology, and the support of our value-add IBM Business Partner, Core IT, we're able to reduce the number of machines that are necessary to support the complete European infrastructure."
In fact, Pentair Water Europe is reducing the number of servers in branch offices by a full two-thirds. With approximately 60 servers in remote locations following the latest round of acquisitions, the company is now able to consolidate them onto 18 IBM System x3650 (formerly IBM eServer™ xSeries®) servers. These are what Branders calls "accelerated branch office servers"—used to virtualize the core services needed at each branch office. They run authentication, file and print, Web caching, software deployment, and, for the larger offices, mail data boxes. Additional centralized services are provided through the data center in Herentals, where Pentair Water Europe has consolidated another 15 servers on IBM BladeCenter.
With the migration to the IBM System x, BladeCenter and VMware solution, Pentair Water Europe sees a number of major benefits:
- Improved management capabilities through standardization of the platform
- Easier and more methodical integration of new acquisitions
- Space and resource savings through consolidation of servers
- Increased utilization rates through virtualization
- Expanded capabilities for remote server management
And with the standardized approach to IT infrastructure, Branders and his team can quickly and accurately assess the IT costs associated with a given acquisition, providing due diligence for the company. With the support of IBM, Core IT provides regular updates, product roadmaps and prices for solution components to assure the optimal standardization.
Branders says there were several key reasons the company chose to go with IBM and Core IT, including first-hand experience with IBM: "Our previous projects with IBM equipment gave us a perspective on the level of quality IBM offers," he says. "We're also impressed with the IBM support model and the cooperation between IBM and its IBM Business Partners. It gives us confidence that we can work together with IBM and Core IT to solve any problems that come up. We've discovered that most of our technology problems can be solved by having a single vendor like IBM."
Looking ahead, the company's growth shows no signs of slowing. "Pentair Water Europe is very aggressive in the acquisition market, and we expect substantial growth in the coming years," Branders explains. "This implementation is putting in place the technologies we need not only today, but over the next couple of years as well."
For more information
For more information about IBM System x, visit our Web site at ibm.com/systems/x.
For more information about Pentair, visit: www.pentair.com
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