Case Study
Global tech company outsourced data center management for 8,000 servers to UST, increased IT productivity by 500%
OUR CLIENT
Founded decades ago, this American multinational technology company produces computer and device parts. As a dominant player in the industry, the company employs over 100,000 people and generates more than $50 billion in revenue annually.
THE CHALLENGE
Designing a strategic plan to manage 8,000 servers in a test and validation engineering lab
The company wanted to open a 12-megawatt co-located data center for use as an internal test and validation engineering lab. When the company’s cloud infrastructure customers have issues, engineers can use server space in the data center to replicate the customer environment to identify and resolve problems. With a planned footprint of 8,000 servers, the global tech company asked UST to create and execute a strategic plan for a data center build-out and server deployment with a long-term managed services agreement (MSA) for the data center. To complicate the situation, this data center was expected to have hundreds of technicians changing at least 10% of the server configurations every day to match customer test and validation requirements. UST’s data center management services plan needed to be bullet proof, so the company could meet its IT service level agreement (SLA) obligations to its customers.
THE TRANSFORMATION
Delivering efficient data center processes so client can focus on its cloud infrastructure customers
After devising a plan, UST’s managed services team completed the build out by standing up the servers, including building CPUs, basic input/output system (BIOS) start-up processes, operating systems, dual in-line memory modules (DIMMs), flashing firmware, and quality checks. With oversight for more than one million hardware items, we also implemented an efficient pipeline of bulk server operations and automations to build and release new systems, decommission aging servers, resolve performance issues and scale capacity as needed.
The managed services agreement allowed the company's IT team to focus on its cloud infrastructure customers without worrying about managing and optimizing the engineering lab. And, with end-to-end visibility, the IT team can make informed strategic and operational decisions to maintain the data center.
THE IMPACT
Accelerating new server release cycles 99%
The technology company previously managed several different engineering lab data centers on its own. Now, with a consolidated lab in one data center under a managed services engagement, the IT team can oversee the optimization of more than 500 servers in a single week—a 500% increase in productivity. The new processes and automations accelerated quality control and release processes from three days to 25 minutes—a 99%. The company also decommissioned the other data centers, creating cost savings and overall efficiencies.
RESOURCES
https://www.ust.com/productengineering