V-TAB is one of the largest printing companies in the Nordic region with six production sites across the south and middle regions of Sweden. The organisation’s core business comes from national newspapers, however its customers also include well-known magazines and business chains. The company is able to handle large capacity printing materials, but still endeavours to act as a creative partner to all of its clients, providing them with a bespoke and personalised service.<\/p>\n
As a comprehensive printing supplier, the company has well-established procedures for logistics, distribution and other postal services, as well as a complete photo studio that is open for client use.<\/p>\n
Challenge<\/strong><\/p>\n It is critical to the company\u2019s success that its operations are supported by a robust IT environment that can meet high-capacity orders, offer complete business continuity and high-availability. The company was operating on a mixture of virtualised and non-virtualised environments which had reached the end of its lifespan. The existing environment was six years old and V-TAB saw this as an opportunity to upgrade. Built on a core customer base of national newspapers, the company couldn\u2019t afford to experience any downtime and the IT team required technology that was simple and easy to manage.<\/p>\n Fredrik Bog\u00e5rdh, IT Manager at V-TAB, commented: \u201cOur clients rely on V-TAB to be a creative partner that can offer a quality, but speedy service. For this reason, we needed a solution that was simple to navigate and gave us improved high-availability and redundancy.\u201d<\/p>\n Searching for a new solution with Data Resilience <\/strong><\/p>\n With the help of its partner, Data Resilience, V-TAB evaluated the IT market extensively looking for a robust solution. Keen to eliminate the burden of data management, the company first considered outsourcing its IT requirements, however after further research, hyperconvergence become a clear choice. \u201cWhen comparing hyperconverged solutions with the cost of outsourcing, the figures just didn\u2019t match up and certainly didn\u2019t point in the direction of outsourcing,\u201d explained Bog\u00e5rdh. \u201cFor this reason, we decided to opt for a hyperconverged solution that we could easily manage ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n As a result, the company considered various options alongside Scale Computing. Bog\u00e5rd commented: \u201cWe were 100% committed to a hyperconverged platform and Scale Computing felt like the perfect choice. One of our core requirements was ensuring we could simplify IT management to save both time and money. We worked with our partner, Data Resilience, to ensure all of our IT requirements would be fulfilled and we have been extremely pleased right from the start.\u201d<\/p>\n Per-Ola M\u00e5rd, Managing Director at Data Resilience, explained: \u201cWe are always looking to help customers meet their IT requirements and for V-TAB, it was essential that the platform was not only simple but cost-effective. Scale Computing\u2019s HC3 platform was a natural choice, it met all of the company\u2019s requirements and the technology is uniquely designed with its own hypervisor and simple interface, providing the easy management V-TAB needs.\u201d<\/p>\n M\u00e5rd continued: \u201cWith HC3, customers only need the basic survival-kit, which provides capabilities for managing the virtualisation, securing your VMs using high-availability, disaster recovery and highly efficient data optimisation functions \u2013 everything you need is included. Adding Scale Computing\u2019s HC3 is like running a weight-watcher programme on your IT infrastructure \u2013 there\u2019s less weight, meaning it\u2019s easier to move your payload.\u201d<\/p>\n The deployment<\/strong><\/p>\n V-TAB opted to deploy Scale Computing\u2019s HC3 cluster as a centralised server platform across two of its sites in Sweden. With the help of Data Resilience, the company had the solution up and running within a day. Scale Computing\u2019s technology now underpins all of V-TAB\u2019s IT operations, offering data mirroring, high-availability and disaster recovery \u2013 all features that the company required.<\/p>\n \u201cData Resilience was extremely helpful throughout the process,\u201d commented Bog\u00e5rdh. \u201cScale Computing\u2019s technology was simple and easy to set up and as soon as we were up and running, the team was able to begin deploying VMs immediately.\u201d<\/p>\n Reaping the benefits \u2013 simplified management <\/strong><\/p>\n Scale Computing\u2019s HC3 combines servers, virtualisation and management into one product, automating the overall management and allowing V-TAB\u2019s IT team to focus on the core business objectives. Previously, the IT team would have to spend time managing the IT environment, but now staff can focus on driving business value and running applications, rather than managing the underlying infrastructure. Bog\u00e5rdh noted: \u201cUsing Scale Computing\u2019s HC3 solution is simple and it gives us full control. Now we can handle all of our data from both of our sites in Sweden, with one simple-to-use interface.\u201d<\/p>\n Reduced costs<\/strong><\/p>\n With no additional software to licence, training or certifications needed to implement and run the Scale Computing solution, V-TAB has enjoyed a range of cost savings. The company has also been able to save 25% of its administration costs due to the simplified management.<\/p>\n Enhancing business continuity<\/strong><\/p>\n In addition, opting to deploy Scale Computing across two sites has allowed V-TAB to mirror all of its data, providing the company with an added benefit of data replication and protection. HC3 gives the IT team regular access to snapshots and cloning technologies to offer a full set of backup and recovery capabilities. As a production site, V-TAB offers services that are in constant use and being able to guarantee business continuity is of paramount importance to the organisation’s success and reputation. Scale Computing\u2019s HC3 platform also offers retention, recovery and failover at no additional cost.<\/p>\n Improving high-availability with on-premises IT<\/strong><\/p>\n V-TAB is also benefiting from high-availability since deploying Scale Computing. As Bog\u00e5rdh explained, this was one of the key requirements of any new IT environment and a major decision as to why the organisations opted for Scale Computing\u2019s on-premises solution over a cloud-based platform. Bog\u00e5rdh noted: \u201cAt first, we did consider a cloud-based solution. When looking to eliminate data management, the cloud and outsourcing IT seems like a natural step. However, it\u2019s also critical to consider other business requirements. For us, the cloud wasn\u2019t an option due to latency. As a production site, high-availability is key and the cloud couldn\u2019t promise to deliver on this. With the cloud, there is also the added risk of latency due to connection issues. Scale Computing\u2019s HC3 platform provides the same benefits as the cloud, but with the added security of an on-premises solution. It really is as simple as putting your data in the cloud, but with added control.\u201d<\/p>\n The future is HC3 <\/strong><\/p>\n Bog\u00e5rdh commented: \u201cScale Computing is a perfect fit for our IT needs. No matter what the problem is, the support team are on hand to help.\u201d As such, V-TAB is now in the process of deploying additional clusters at its production (ROBO) sites following its 12-month deployment with Scale Computing.<\/p>\n Bog\u00e5rdh concluded: \u201cTo me, this is a great testament to Scale Computing and its product. We are looking forward to a continued partnership and seeing further benefits from a quality product.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" V-TAB is one of the largest printing companies in the Nordic region with six production sites across the south and middle regions of Sweden. The organisation’s core business comes from national newspapers, however its customers also include well-known magazines and business chains. The company is able to handle large capacity printing materials, but still endeavours […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":24123,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[205,51,476,29,93,24],"tags":[8672,8674,5912,5913,5915,8673,8671],"class_list":["post-24122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-case-studies","category-case-study-newsletter","category-nordic","category-software","category-top-stories","category-used","tag-data-resilience","tag-hc3","tag-hyperconverged-solution","tag-hyperconvergence","tag-scale-computing","tag-simplified-management","tag-v-tab"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24122"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24314,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24122\/revisions\/24314"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/eu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}