they work within the global IT Strategy, he is able to pursue emerging technologies to drive operational efficiencies. V
CASE STUDY
Connecting To The World Customer: Vale Australia Industry: Mining
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Vale Trident SimpliVity | Connecting To The World
TRIDENT AND SIMPLIVITY ASSIST VALE TO CONNECT TO THE WORLD VALE AUSTRALIA
THE CHALLENGE
The technological needs of Vale Australia are quite diverse, and Matthew is responsible for supporting the needs of 180 staff based in three very different locations. To ensure they are agile and responsive to these diverse needs, Vale Global gives Matthew a large degree of autonomy. This means that, while they work within the global IT Strategy, he is able to pursue emerging technologies to drive operational efficiencies.
“Matt met with me and pitched a great new product. SimpliVity looked like it could simplify our infrastructure and offer significant cost reduction,” Matthew said. “I thought it was worth having a presentation and finding out more about SimpliVity – if it could bring together our very disparate systems and reduce our costs then it would be good to find out more.”
Vale is a global mining company with its headquarters based in Brazil. The company’s Australian coal mining headquarters is based in Brisbane and over the last couple of years the Australian arm has undergone significant change. With a focus on improving operational efficiency and reducing expenses, Vale Australia’s IT Manager, Matthew Wells, has been seeking ways to achieve these goals whilst improving the company’s ability to achieve their technology goals.
For the last few years, Vale Australia’s IT Department has been in a consolidation and reduction phase, looking for ways to reduce costs while maximising the services that they can offer. Having undergone significant infrastructure change and migrating some services to the cloud, Matthew wasn’t exactly seeking a major change to his systems, but when Trident Computer Services Technology Innovator Matt Marris begin discussing SimpliVity, he immediately knew it was a technology that had immense potential.
Matthew Wells from Vale Australia and Geoff Bentley from The Bentley Group
“Trident and SimpliVity have been fantastic! We have been informed throughout the whole process.”
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Vale Vale Trident Trident SimpliVity SimpliVity || Connecting Connecting To To The The World World
“I thought it was worth having a presentation and finding out more about SimpliVity – if it could bring together our very disparate systems and reduce our costs then it would be good to find out more.” – Matthew Wells
THE SOLUTION: TRIDENT AND SIMPLIVITY Trident Computer Services and SimpliVity presented their solution to Vale Australia over the following 6 months, providing a series of information sessions, product demonstrations and webinars with the global SimpliVity team to show Matthew just what the product could do and how it would benefit Vale Australia. “We saw very quickly that SimpliVity is a disruptive technology. It challenged what we were doing and how we did it, and offered operational efficiencies that were out of this world. No other solutions could show this to us.” For Matthew, the impact of implementing a SimpliVity solution was immediate. “We were able to migrate from our cloud service provider into our new SimpliVity solution over the space of a weekend. There was less than 48 hours of downtime and SimpliVity were on the phone assisting us with the deployment,” Matthew said. “We could see immediate benefits as the data replicated across the nodes and the simplified backup and replication systems kicked into place.”
“Our SimpliVity solution has provided us with a ‘set and forget’ system for redundancy and backup. It’s taken away the need for us to manage storage requirements and data administration,” Matthew said. “Best of all, it has significantly reduced our hosting running costs. We had 12 large, cloud based servers and when you combine the cost of hosting and managing them, with connectivity and backup charges, we were spending significant recurrent budget each month. SimpliVity has reduced these costs and brought our production servers back into our own data centre. We are attaining cloud economics from an on-premise solution.”
“SimpliVity is a disruptive technology. It challenged what we were doing and how we did it, and offered operational efficiencies that were out of this world. No other solutions could show this to us.”
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Vale Trident SimpliVity | Connecting To The World
THE IMPACT
Matthew has also found the integrated console a real time saver. “We can easily see the status of our servers, our backups and redundant systems. There is no need to dial-in remotely and check our backups and it doesn’t need to be monitored by IT staff.” For Matthew, the process of rolling out SimpliVity with Trident has been an excellent experience. “Trident and SimpliVity have been fantastic! We have been informed throughout the whole process, from design, through ordering and implantation we have been kept fully in the loop. They have done everything within their power to get the right solution for us and have it installed correctly.
SUMMARY
CHALLENGES • Reduce operational costs associated with their current cloud solution • Reduce complexity within infrastructure and heavy reliance on IT staff • Provide a flexible way to reduce and consolidate infrastructure. APPROACH • Thorough evaluation of SimpliVity • Detailed design and personalised approach to implementation • Migration back from the cloud to a hyperconverged, on-premise solution. RESULTS • Reduced operational cost and increased return on investment • Increased operational efficiencies • High-end disaster recovery solution.
“You never want to be at the end of a phone feeling lost, and Trident have given us the personal care and attention we wanted.”
Vale Australia - Brisbane Level 10, 100 Creek Street Brisbane, QLD 4000 Australia Telephone: 07 3136 0500 Website: www.vale.com/australia
Trident Computer Services Suite 1, 328 Reserve Rd Cheltenham, VIC 3192 Australia Telephone: 03 8587 7500 Email:
[email protected] Website: www.trident.com.au
