Energizing Service Delivery Speed and Agility with Private Cloud Automation
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- Europe
Country
- Portugal
Product
- Morpheus
Tech Stack
- VMware vSphere
- Nutanix Acropolis
- Ansible
- PowerShell
- GitLab
- Microsoft DNS
- Cisco ACI
- phpIPAM
- SIEM Platform
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Digital Expertise
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Private Cloud
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Applicable Industries
- Utilities
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Process Control & Optimization
- Infrastructure Inspection
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
About The Customer
Redes Energéticas Nacionais (REN) is a Portuguese energy sector company holding the concession on the country’s two main infrastructure networks: the National Electricity Transmission Grid and the National Natural Gas Transportation Grid. REN is also responsible for the reception, storage and regasification of liquefied natural gas (LNG), the underground storage and transport of natural gas, and is a public telecommunications service provider. As Portugal’s exclusive Transmission System Operator (TSO) it is responsible for the planning, construction, operation, maintenance, and global management of both these grids and associated infrastructures; serving a population of 10 million people. Furthermore, REN is internationalizing its operations with a growing energy presence in South America.
The Challenge
REN’s significant domestic and international growth coupled with a drive to further improve performance and quality of service lead to them commissioning two new datacentres in 2018 to host the country’s critical information and telecommunications systems. REN’s original datacentres were siloed, hundreds of kilometers apart, and focused on Disaster Recovery (DR) as the primary use case. Provisioning new applications or VMs took two to three weeks, involved stitching together disconnected technologies, and was both manual and error-prone. In addition, a focus on Virtual Machine (VM) provisioning rather than application architecture, a lack of telemetry and analytics, and the understandable difficulties of knowledge sharing amongst distributed employees and contractors gave the team at REN significant challenges as they tried to position themselves for future growth. Faced with technical debt and legacy processes, REN recognized the possibilities offered by implementing a unified approach to application orchestration and automation. Their new mission was to achieve a single end-to-end workflow with complete visibility to all stakeholders.
The Solution
The team at REN embarked on a comprehensive evaluation process of multiple cloud management and automation platforms with a focus on both the technical solution and also the business relationship. REN’s ideal platform was a combination of out of the box codeless integrations with the likes of VMware, Nutanix, Microsoft DNS, Cisco ACI, Ansible, and GitLab; and simple customization to provide workflow automation in the absence of built-in integrations. REN’s Morpheus proof-of-concept was up, running, and fully deployed in less than a day; largely down to 95% of the technology integrations being available out of the box. The remaining 5% of technology integrations were covered by a simple to use, extensible plug-in SDK. The REN team found the user interface and reporting ensured transparency and visibility, and that the platform proved reliable and simple to use. The Morpheus team’s advice and expertise both during and since implementation has proved a stable foundation for a strong business relationship.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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