A test environment is needed for algorithms and architectures that meets a common set of requirements for many testbeds (see "Testbed in Depth")GOAL:A test facility that can be configured into complex edge compute environments, in order to further the state-of-the-art in edge analytics and algorithms

Mitsubishi Electric, a leading manufacturer of electrical and electronic equipment, was facing challenges in its software development processes for large-scale real-time systems at its Kamakura Works production hub. The software engineering department was tasked with developing software solutions for complex systems such as satellites and ground control centers. However, these solutions were becoming larger and more complex, and the development lead time was getting shorter. The department was working to refine and systematize its processes for developing various types of software solutions. They were also preparing for a further increase in the speed and scale of future software development. The department aimed to cope with the growing sophistication and speed of software development by promoting automation, flexibly meet the demands of the most complex pipeline projects, and realize a secure on-premises environment that was not connected to the Internet.

To have the most robust, secure, and effective IT architecture possible.To achieve the highly available IT infrastructure that Stevanato required, a rigorous networking architecture was combined with an equally strict server architecture in two connected data centers between Padua and Bologna. 

Sasa Singapore, a leading cosmetics retailing group in Asia, was facing challenges with its legacy IT systems which were nearing the end of their useful life. The company was continuously looking for innovative ways to contain costs and streamline operations. The Commercial Manager for Sasa, John Seah, decided the time was right to consolidate and simplify the corporate data center. The company evaluated a number of options including Nutanix, and eventually selected SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure for the retailer’s next-generation IT implementation.

KHD, a global leader in cement plant technology, equipment, and services, was facing challenges with its legacy IT infrastructure. The company's data growth rates were increasing, and the costs associated with managing this data were also on the rise. The complexity within the data center was growing, with the need to deploy numerous different deduplication, compression, and optimization appliances to keep up with data growth and the performance requirements of enterprise applications. The increasing capital costs for added storage, compute, various appliances, and software licensing were a concern. Additionally, operational expenses were mounting as administrators were spending countless hours on menial maintenance tasks instead of focusing on innovation to drive the business forward. In certain countries, where staff turnover rates are typically high, the lack of trained IT resources was impacting growth. KHD needed a new solution, based on a fundamentally new data architecture.

High Cotton’s disjointed IT environment was becoming increasingly risky, and costly to maintain and scale. The company relied on a mix of legacy equipment including HP servers, third-party storage systems, and they didn’t have any in-house data protection. Administering the fragmented environment was a manually intensive and error-prone undertaking involving a number of distinct management systems. Deploying new workloads—allocating compute and storage resources, instituting backup policies, performing restores—could take hours and weeks using the company’s legacy solutions. Even worse, disasters or equipment failures had the potential to impair critical IT services and disrupt business; restoring applications, including VMware Horizon View VDI apps, could take hours or days using the incumbent data protection solutions and methods.

Marketing Innovators’ aging IT systems–HP servers and SAN arrays supporting a variety of business applications–were becoming increasingly costly and inefficient to operate, impairing service agility and business innovation. Deploying new workloads–allocating compute and storage resources, configuring data protection policies–took days using the company’s legacy storage solutions and data backup and replication tools. Shane Ladd, Sr. System Administrator for Marketing Innovators, initiated a data center modernization program to improve the scalability, performance and economics of the company’s IT infrastructure. After an extensive evaluation process involving a number of vendors including Nutanix®, Nimble Storage, Scale Computing and Maxta®, Ladd selected SimpliVity OmniStack Solution with Cisco UCS for its next-generation data center architecture.

St. John’s Riverside Hospital had been running their existing infrastructure environment for seven years, and the time had come for them to expand and update their technology. A multitude of issues came to a head, the most urgent being that their 40TB storage systems were quickly running out of physical space loads, restricting their ability to scale and grow. Their legacy servers were also oversubscribed to the point that failover was completely prohibited, leaving St. John’s Riverside Hospital in a compromised and unacceptable state if the system should ever crash. With so many mission-critical applications running in their virtualized environment, data protection and speedy data backup are essential to the well being of St. John’s Riverside and their patients. Using legacy backup software for their D2D backup as well as for an offsite location five miles away, St. John’s was seeing RPOs of eight to ten hours with a three-month retention and, depending on the data, RTOs could take five to ten minutes for files, with full servers taking up to 30 minutes. These backup times were unfavorable for St. John’s, who prides itself on continually improving efficiency and speed.

GoodLife Fitness, the largest health club chain in Canada, was facing challenges with its outsourced IT implementation. The system was costly, inefficient, and lacked agility. The company was heavily dependent on its managed service provider, which charged high monthly fees and required a three-week lead time for any changes. As the company was relocating to a new corporate headquarters, the management decided to bring IT operations in-house to increase agility and reduce operational expenses.

Surrey Place Centre, a specialized clinical services provider for individuals living with developmental disabilities, autism spectrum disorder and those with visual impairments, was operating with a fractured IT environment. The combination of HP and Dell servers and Dell storage arrays was costly and complicated to administer and maintain. The organization relied on an outdated tape-based backup solution for offsite disaster recovery. Catastrophes had the potential to disrupt critical business applications for days or even weeks while systems were recovered.

Manufacture Belge de Chocolats (MBC), a Belgian chocolate manufacturer, was part of the corporate Godiva family until 2019 when Godiva sold its Brussels operations. This led to MBC becoming a standalone company, still manufacturing chocolates for Godiva but also creating its own brand - Rosalie's. The company aims to be an agile manufacturer that can meet production demands for all types of customers, including smaller batch orders. However, following the divestiture, MBC had to replicate the technical and administrative services that had been centralized under Godiva in the US. This included security, product specification management, and an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. To meet its new manufacturing goals, MBC needed to digitalize its factory and automate its processes.

University College of the North (UCN) is committed to the development of its region, northern Manitoba, where approximately 70% of its student population is indigenous. The region is widely dispersed and remote, with nine of UCN's 12 regional training centers located in First Nations communities. The challenge was to expand access to IT training and career options for indigenous women in these communities, without requiring them to leave their social supports and face culture shock by moving over 600 km away to Winnipeg. The Information Technology Readiness North (InTeRN) project was created to meet this challenge, but it needed to be structured in a way that would be successful in an indigenous community, incorporating a holistic perspective and mentorship.

Riml, a family-run tourism business in Tyrol, Austria, needed to modernize its IT infrastructure to meet the increasing demands of its guests. The company's existing IT infrastructure was outdated and insufficient to handle the growing needs of the business, which includes hotels, guest houses, mountain cabins, restaurants, and sports shops. The company required a high-performance IT platform that could ensure maximum availability for all of its services and also accommodate future requirements. The new IT infrastructure needed to be agile, compact, highly available, and capable of providing state-of-the-art enterprise technologies for SMEs.

S&B India's existing setup had served them well until now. As their workload grew, they were looking to refresh their IT infrastructure to be scalable for at least the next five years. Hence, they knew hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) was the answer. Given the scale, complexities, and criticality of the engineering and design services that S&B India offers to crucial capital goods, basic materials, and energy sectors, data integrity and high availability are paramount for the organization. Until recently S&B India ran on a conventional setup of HPE servers with SAN storage and several applications including CAD/CAM and Oracle database running on VMware® clusters. As the organizational workload continued to rapidly grow, S&B India was overwhelmed with IT performance issues. Given the resource requirement creeping up on S&B India's IT infrastructure and network, its far-site, on-premises disaster recovery setup wasn't keeping up with the scale. Space constraints to continuously add infrastructure and lack of centralized server control added to the woes.

Aston Martin Red Bull Racing, a Formula 1 team, is in a constant race against time, not just on the track but also off it. Each Formula 1 circuit is different, with its own challenges and characteristics and the car is customized for each race location. Between races, the clock is ticking to create new designs and adapt the car for the next circuit. An F1 car can go through some 30,000 changes throughout the season and from week-to-week, this can involve 1,000 design elements. The result is a constant evolution of change in the design process, all of which needs to be simulated, manufactured, and tested. With a typical year consisting of more than 20 races, Aston Martin Red Bull Racing needs a robust technology infrastructure in place to make the team agile, efficient, and business-like, both on and off the track.

Kingsway Hospitals, a new healthcare facility in Nagpur, Central India, needed to build its IT infrastructure from the ground up. The hospital required a robust and efficient Hospital Information Management System (HIMS) and Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) that could handle terabytes of patient data and medical imaging files. The systems needed to function independently and offer high-speed performance. The hospital also required a solution that could ensure zero downtime, enhanced data backup and disaster recovery, and maintain the highest levels of data security and privacy. The solution also needed to be flexible and scalable to accommodate the hospital's growth.

High Technology Industries (HTI) needed a modern and homogeneous IT infrastructure in order to standardise the systems of the group companies in the different countries. The infrastructure was both to meet the business needs of the next few years and to conform to the enhanced data privacy requirements. The various businesses had already come to the realisation that their rapid growth and geographical distances had created huge differences between the individual IT infrastructures in place at the miscellaneous IT locations of the group. This was presenting an obstacle to internal collaboration, since projects are delivered by the group across sites and a full range of winter sports technologies is covered.

The Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Institute of Medical Science and Research (SVPIMSR) in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, is a large-scale healthcare facility with 18 floors, 1500 beds, 32 operation theaters, and 139 ICUs. To ensure its smooth functioning, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) needed a reliable and secure IT infrastructure to manage its patient records, hospital ERP, users, and other applications. This infrastructure had to provide secure desktops for thousands of doctors, nurses, and administrative staff. The system had to be resilient enough to offer better uptime, have data protection capabilities to quickly recover from data loss, deliver consistent performance that would not degrade over time, and be disaster recovery-ready for future implementation.

Aston Martin Red Bull Racing, a UK-based Formula One racing team, was facing inefficiencies in its car design process due to the need for aerodynamics engineers to use two separate workstations, each running a different operating system (OS), for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. This resulted in a slow and cumbersome design process, with engineers having to manually port data from one workstation to another. Additionally, the input and outputs to CFD 3D modeling are very graphic intensive, requiring high-spec GPUs on the workstations.

A. K. Capital Services Ltd. operates in a highly competitive market environment where systems must be up and running at all times. With high volumes of transactions at nanosecond speed, there is no room for latency and downtime. Any disruption could damage A. K. Capital Services’ reputation and market standing, and cause huge financial loss to clients. With increased connectivity and digitalisation, high availability and system accessibility became the foundation for business growth and credibility. However, with expanding operations and volumes, it became increasingly difficult for A. K. Group to manage disparate systems while ensuring uptime, efficient system utilisation and keeping cost under control. The application environment was highly complex as some applications were deployed on legacy systems and could not be integrated, causing serious performance issues. The company wanted a simple solution to manage the complex environment by consolidating all applications on a single platform and improve manageability to deliver a uniform and consistent experience to users at all times. As a player in financial services, ensuring data availability and data protection was a serious challenge. At the same time, the regulatory environment became more stringent and compliance guidelines were mandatory. Given the financial implications of transactions, A. K. Group could not afford downtime, and business continuity and disaster recovery were critical considerations for A. K. Group.