A.Schulman Opts for Proact

A. Schulman, Inc., an international
supplier of plastic compounds, is
streamlining its European operations, based on a centrally managed IT
environment and implemented Proact IT Group AB
FlexPod, allowing the company to reduce its server park by 80%.

A. Schulman is migrating its European country organization to an
integrated European company structure. As a result, the company is also
carrying out an ICT integration exercise at European
level. The consolidation of the European server park proved to be one of the
major challenges.

"First of all, we made a list of all
the servers that were in use across our European sites," said Wim
Nagels, ICT director EMEA, A. Schulman. "The list contained no less than 160 physical servers: a very
heterogeneous server park that offered little to no ground for integration."

A. Schulman decided to consolidate its server environment over a period of one
to two years, starting with a limited scope, based on FlexPod. Storage and
cloud integrator Proact’s solution FlexPod is a data center platform for
hosting virtualized applications. The platform combines products from NetApp, Cisco and VMware.

Nagels, continued: "FlexPod offers
the flexibility we need. We can set up new virtualized servers in a matter of
minutes, quickly responding to our business needs. FlexPod also allows us to
quickly roll out a standardized IT environment throughout our entire European
organization."

Additionally, Proact implemented Backup as a Service of Proact as the backup
solution for A. Schulman’s business critical systems.

Nagels, concluded: "Using FlexPod,
we expect to reduce our server park by 80%."