GRZ IT Center Gains Private Cloud Security at Public Cloud Prices

GRZ IT Center

GRZ IT Center GmbH is located in Linz, Oberösterreich, Austria and is part of the Data Processing, Hosting, and Related Services Industry. GRZ IT Center GmbH has 437 employees at this location and generates $154.40 million in sales (USD). There are 221 companies in the GRZ IT Center GmbH corporate family. GRZ IT Center provides information technology solutions for the banking industry.

GRZ IT Center specializes in providing IT services for leading regional banks in Austria. Headquartered in Linz, the company employs more than 450 people to support 86 banks, which collectively operate 458 branches and serve more than a million customers.

In the last few years, competition in the IT services market has intensified dramatically. In particular, global public cloud vendors are using their economies of scale to compete aggressively on price. With this trend set to continue, local providers such as GRZ IT Center face a choice: Find ways to cut costs and compete more effectively, or risk watching services being moved off into the public cloud.

GRZ IT Center established that reducing the manual administration effort was a key opportunity for cost reduction: Administrators were tasked with managing around 2,000 virtual servers and 1,000 VMware virtualized desktops. So, the company focused its attention on the automation of its VMware environments, aiming to enable more efficient operations and reduce workload.

To simplify the landscape, the team chose to consolidate its VMware land scapes to just two Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G800 models with hybrid flash, in combination with 96 Hitachi Compute Blade 500 servers.

Storage is virtualized using Hitachi Storage Virtualization Operating System (SVOS), with automatic storage tiering provided by Hitachi Dynamic Tiering software. This solution shifts frequently accessed data to the fastest storage and rarely used data to more economical storage. Additionally, GRZ IT Center saves time and money by being able to easily extend the solution in predefined steps with components that come prebuilt and ready to install, allowing the company to increase capacity and performance flexibly, as needed.

For business continuity, GRZ IT Center deployed SVOS’s global-active device. If one of the two storage systems is knocked out of action, the global-active device ensures continuous service with no business interruption.

The Hitachi Vantara Global Services Solutions team manages the solution up to the virtualization layer, releasing GRZ IT Center’s in-house IT team from many time-consuming routine-management tasks.