Construction, operation and handling – Core Infrastructure Management – competent, reliable & economical.

Situation:

A DAX company in the chemical industry with approx. 120,000 employees requires support in the setup, transfer and subsequent operation of an extensive, complex infrastructure in the areas of Windows, Linux, load balancing, virtualization, storage/HCI and firewalls.
Compliance with the highest availability and security requirements as well as diverse interfaces to other operational units and services in a multi-vendor environment create a highly complex organizational and process structure.

With extensive, grown experience, competence & expertise in the support of complex enterprise organizations, the n_Team has been fulfilling the task for several years/2018.

Brief description:

Netlution is currently responsible for this 24x7h service with a team of 13 colleagues (incl. SM) for the operation of a highly complex & highly critical IT core infrastructure including two on-call services (1st line & 2nd line). The main focus is on 3rd level support through incident, change and problem handling according to ITIL. In addition, the colleagues deal with the creation and continuation of operating manuals & documentation for submission to the customer’s governance as well as proactive advice on the continuous further development of the highly critical infrastructure and the associated implementation. In addition to complying with the highest SLA requirements and security standards, the team strives for continuous improvement and increased efficiency by identifying and implementing automation potential.

The service is constantly updated and expanded from a technological perspective, such as taking over the management of the storage environment. Furthermore, Netlution provides short-term support in related projects & POCs.

Environment size: Over 40 locations; over 600 server systems; over 120k employees

Customer request:

A competent team of experts was needed for the new service, which would take over operational responsibility for the entire product life cycle after the end of the project and continue to develop the service until the end of life, operating it stably, securely and economically.

In summary, this means

  • Service setup, transition, coordination & migration (from project to operation)
  • Stable service operation
  • Continuous optimization through automation
  • Advice on further development of the infrastructure
  • Maintaining the security level of the infrastructure
  • Regular compliance checks

Challenges:

  • Operation of the VMware, Windows, Linux, storage and load balancer service lines
  • Operation is implemented as follows:
    • Short update and upgrade cycles
    • Systems are hardened
    • Operational documentation is maintained and further developed
    • Annual disaster tests according to ITSCM
    • Further development of automation
    • Development of proposals regarding infrastructure design

A concept had to be developed for cost-effective 7×24 operation (with 2 on-call teams) within a highly complex multi-vendor structure, in which the IT specialists deployed are continuously familiar with the operating processes, but the net capacity requirement only allows these employees to be deployed pro rata temporis. In addition, the skill  requirements and capacity needs of the expert team varied considerably depending on the phase of the product lifecycle. A solution had to be found for this.

KPIs:

  • Ensuring the operation of the core infrastructure 24/7 consisting of over 600 server systems
  • SLA fulfillment of over 99
  • Resolved several thousand incidents in the last 12 months
  • Processing of almost 1000 changes in the last 12 months
  • Competent suggestions for the further development of the infrastructure
  • Fast processing of tickets in accordance with contractually agreed response times (from 0.5 hours) and resolution times (from 2 hours)
  • Annual disaster recovery tests
  • Creation and maintenance of ITSCM documents
  • Regular patching of systems (99% monthly)
  • Transparent, centralized resource and deployment management
  • Planning security thanks to uniform, consistent billing basis
  • Administrative relief

Netlution solution:

Netlution provides the customer with a customized adaptive “one-stop solution”: Within an initial project assignment, a complete highly critical system landscape was set up “from scratch”, including planning, design and coordination.

This involved managing global setups and the associated migrations, coordinating service providers in the respective countries to enable the creation of highly secure networks.

In this context, Netlution facilitated and supported the transfer from the project to a stable operating service. The focus was always on ensuring the service, administration, optimization and further development of the highly critical and highly complex system landscape, including infrastructure components and services.

Project duration:

Ongoing since 2017.

Netlution services:

  • Ensuring service, administration, optimization and further development of the highly critical and highly complex system landscape including infrastructure components and services
  • Troubleshooting 2nd / 3rd level (ticket-based)
  • Service management (incl. customer contact, review meetings, steering committee, etc.)
  • KPI / SLA reporting
  • Documentation (incl. knowledge transfer management, e.g. wiki, logbook)
  • Technologies/resources used
  • Managed service (incl. SLAs) in a rolling deployment system (RES) with > 13 Netlution consultants/ senior consultants
  • 2 Netlution Service Managers
  • Coverage of capacitive load peaks and project assignments