Modernising IT to increase agility

During a recent event organized by DEEP, the engineering consultancy Schroeder & Associés and the insurance company LALUX discussed the IT infrastructure transformation projects they carried out using Nutanix solutions.

While digital transformation is now an essential lever for improving organizational competitiveness, it brings many challenges. To further digitalize, enable the business to become more agile, and reduce IT management costs, it is necessary to modernize the information system, particularly the infrastructure. DEEP, with expertise covering the entire IT value chain, supports organizations in facing these challenges.

Schroeder & Associés and the insurance company LALUX have both undertaken major transformation projects with this in mind.

Ensuring continuous availability of tools and data: a technological imperative

"With the exponential growth of data volumes, it is crucial to ensure uninterrupted access to business applications and digital resources," explains Sven Lamberty, CTO at Schroeder & Associés. "In 2019, our legacy IT infrastructure was showing its limits in terms of scalability and performance. The relocation of our headquarters to Kockelscheuer was an opportunity to adopt a modernized infrastructure to strengthen our agility, optimize operational costs, ensure resilience, and simplify system management."

Adopting a hyperconverged private cloud

The choice was made for a virtualized private cloud architecture deployed on-premises, ensuring granular control of environments and high availability of critical services. "The Nutanix hyperconverged solution met our requirements thanks to its distributed architecture and its ability to unify compute, storage, and networking. The Nutanix Move Tool significantly accelerated the migration of workloads, reducing complexity and downtime."
The role of DEEP, our strategic partner, was decisive for engineering, deployment, training, and operational support.

Resilient and scalable infrastructure for unified management

The current environment, deployed at both our headquarters and partner data centers, combines high availability and service continuity. This hyperconverged infrastructure allows centralized resource management, with built-in fault tolerance and secure multi-site access. "This robust and scalable platform, supported by our close collaboration with DEEP, provides us with a solid foundation to support our future IT projects and address upcoming technological challenges," concludes Sven Lamberty.

Supporting the business transformation more effectively

As part of a large transformation project launched eight years ago, LALUX Assurances chose to implement a hyperconverged infrastructure based on the Nutanix platform. "We are an independent insurance company, active since 1920, with around 500 employees and one of the largest networks of agents in Luxembourg," recalls François Capra, Head of IT Infrastructure and Operations at LALUX Assurances. "Eight years ago, to better support the digital transformation of our business, the company decided to modernize its IT environment to simplify and improve system efficiency."

Reducing complexity, simplifying management

More specifically, LALUX wanted to replace part of its storage infrastructure with a solution that was less complex to manage. The new environment had to be easier to administer to free up time for the teams to focus on higher value-added tasks. To meet these needs, the company chose to implement a private cloud based on Nutanix’s software-defined solution. "At the time, DEEP already had local references for these solutions, even though they were still relatively new, and could guarantee quality support," continues François Capra.

Strong guarantees

To help the insurance company validate this strategic direction, DEEP and Nutanix set up a proof of concept. "Not only did the 100% virtualized solution meet our expectations, with consistent and easy-to-use features, but it also offered the best total cost of ownership over a five-year horizon. It also significantly increased the flexibility and scalability of our systems, ensuring we could respond effectively to future needs."

The deployment of this new environment was carried out quickly thanks to the expertise of DEEP's teams. "In one day, the solution was implemented at the server level, installed and integrated into the VMware cluster," continues Capra. "Since going live, the environment has improved performance and is characterized by high stability."

Getting stronger with the advice of an external partner

François Capra concluded his presentation with an analogy to triathlon, a discipline he practices personally. "Managing IT can be compared to how one prepares as a triathlete. Achieving high performance involves strengthening your abilities and training. In IT, if you want to go further, you need to think about how to improve the way you work. You have to ask what can be adapted or changed. And often, you need to call on a partner — like a coach — to open your mind, step out of your habits and certainties, and sometimes better equip yourself to go much further, much faster. That’s the coaching role DEEP played for us, enabling us, with Nutanix, to build new foundations to go further."