German Engineering Company KHD Customer of SimpliVity

SimpliVity Corp. announced that KHD Humboldt Wedag International AG, in cement plant technology, equipment and services, has selected its OmniCube Data Virtualization Platform to streamline the management of its data centers.

SimpliVity’s hyper-converged infrastructure allows KHD to keep its IT resources on site, while benefiting from cloud-like economics.

“SimpliVity’s hyper-converged infrastructure solution helped us solve two significant issues-growing data center complexity and rising costs,” said Joerg Ludwig, CIO, KHD. “We were able to dramatically simplify our IT environment and management requirements, improve operational efficiencies, and reduce our mounting operational expenses in our global data centers.“

Based in Cologne, Germany, KHD is an organization with additional locations in India, China, Brazil and the US. The company is in cement plant technology, equipment and services. As KHD’s business has expanded, so has its data growth rates and challenges with its legacy IT infrastructure.

As cost and complexity increased, KHD sought help from Wipro Ltd, an IT, consulting and business services company, and SimpliVity partner. Wipro introduced SimpliVity’s Data Virtualization Platform as the solution. KHD was impressed with the ability to provide the economics and efficiency of the cloud, while keeping its data and applications on-premise with its simple, scalable, modular 2U OmniCube buildings blocks that are built on x86 commodity hardware.

The hyper-converged infrastructure consists of OmniStack software, packaged into the 2U appliance called OmniCube. It provides two technological advances: data virtualization and global unified management at the VM-level. The company’s Data Virtualization Platform offers deduplication, compression and optimization of all data inline, at inception, once and forever across all stages of the data lifecycle. As such, data efficiency rates are increased more than 100:1, improving data mobility and management locally, and between remote sites.

The hyper-converged infrastructure has also allowed KHD to increase operational efficiency while eliminating the need to train staff on several management screens. Wipro first helped KHD address its data center in India, where staff turnover and expenses were high – including the operational expense of continuously training and retraining staff on a growing stack of products. Germany, US and Russia implementations followed. SimpliVity’s global unified management capability allows KHD to manage its resources from a central location, leveraging VMware vCenter, as a single pane of glass.

“Typically, the issue with the cloud is that it forces customers to give up capabilities in order to benefit from promises of cost reduction and business agility,” said Mitch Breen, SVP, global sales, SimpliVity. “With SimpliVity’s hyper-converged infrastructure, these trade-offs are eliminated and customers like KHD can realize the best of both worlds through x86 cloud economics with enterprise capabilities.“