Featured content from our partner, Lenovo.
Background
One of the leading technology services providers in South Africa, IntDev specializes in helping small- and medium-sized enterprises drive expansion and innovation with cutting-edge technology. Through its managed services business, IntDev creates tailored cloud environments that deliver dependable performance, reliability, and scalability for a wide range of private and public sector clients.
As more companies look to reduce their costs and enhance operations using cloud technology, IntDev saw an opportunity to grow its client base. To help more organizations reap the rewards of cloud computing, IntDev set out to expand its market share in its domestic market and other countries across Africa.
“We knew that we wanted to keep using Cloudistics, so it made sense for us to look for infrastructure that would easily integrate with this platform and support it in the long term. At the same time, refreshing our architecture gave us the opportunity to build even more resilient systems: a move that would help us strengthen business continuity and boost competitiveness.” —Pedro Maia, Managing Director, IntDev
Challenge
With its existing cloud infrastructure nearing capacity, the company realized that it needed a fresh approach. The aim was to enable seamless scalability while ensuring reliable, high-performance cloud services for clients around the clock. To achieve these goals, IntDev targeted a performant, reliable, and easy-to-manage infrastructure platform.
For many years, IntDev has trusted the composable cloud platform Cloudistics to underpin its cloud services. When the company’s existing hardware provider terminated its partnership with Cloudistics, IntDev decided to move to a new infrastructure vendor to continue to benefit from the platform.
Why Lenovo? Enhanced, Cost-Effective Performance
Lenovo has partnered with Cloudistics to create a next-generation software-defined infrastructure, and reached out to IntDev to propose a new solution based on the Lenovo ThinkAgile platform, powered by 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors.
“While Lenovo’s support for the Cloudistics platform was a key plus for us, it was clear that the Lenovo ThinkAgile platform would deliver superior system integration, reliability, and availability compared with our existing hardware. And with the 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors built into the Lenovo solution, we were confident that we would see significant performance improvements, too.” — Pedro Maia, Managing Director, IntDev
“We were impressed with Lenovo’s proactive approach,” says Maia. “They took the time to understand the unique challenges we faced and put together a detailed transformation plan designed to help us grow and develop our business.
“The Lenovo team was instrumental in helping us migrate our mission-critical systems quickly and without causing any disruption to client-facing activities. In fact, Lenovo helped us migrate a 15 GB transaction database for a large South African gaming company in under four hours.1 Crucially, the client was unaware that we were making any changes to their environment during the move.” —Pedro Maia, Managing Director, IntDev
Forging Lasting Partnerships
Impressed with Lenovo’s proposal, IntDev enlisted the help of Lenovo Services to implement two Lenovo ThinkAgile CP6000 servers, split between two data centers in an active/active architecture. Next, IntDev migrated its existing Veeam Backup & Recovery solution, which the company uses to perform regular system backups for client cloud environments, to the new infrastructure.
Maia comments: “With the native replication and backup features in Lenovo ThinkAgile servers, we knew that we could trust in Lenovo solutions to keep our cloud environments running smoothly around the clock.”
“With seamless integration between Lenovo and Veeam solutions, we can offer highly resilient cloud services.” —Pedro Maia, Managing Director, IntDev
Results
With Lenovo ThinkAgile servers powering its cloud and managed services, IntDev has increased system performance, helping the company to boost client satisfaction. For example, one large gaming company saw a 52% reduction in the time taken to calculate winning bets, down from 25 minutes to just under 12 minutes.1 Ultimately, the Lenovo ThinkAgile platform helps IntDev keep its clients’ systems running smoothly, enabling them to provide rapid and responsive services to their end customers.
IntDev has achieved significant savings by deploying Lenovo solutions. By consolidating hardware and reducing rack space from 12 to just two, and cutting down staff time, IntDev has lowered its overall infrastructure costs by up to 40%.1 Maia confirms: “We can on pass these savings, helping us to offer competitive deals to new and existing clients.”
He continues: “We’ve also reduced our data center footprint, consolidating our systems from a 170 server 12 42U rack architecture to just 18 Lenovo ThinkAgile compute nodes occupying only 14U of rack space, which power our entire operations. In turn, this has helped us to reduce energy and cooling costs, and system complexity—making our IT infrastructure easier to manage and maintain.”
Looking ahead, IntDev plans to increase data center capacity by implementing an additional 400 TB of Lenovo Network Area Storage across both of its sites, which will give the company the room to grow its business as it continues on its international expansion journey.
- 40% lower TCO drives competitive pricing
- 52% performance increase for one client
- 83% reduction in floorspace1
“As well as helping us to enhance our mission critical infrastructure and deliver excellent client service, Lenovo has forged a strategic partnership with us—supporting us on our growth journey and opening up new opportunities for us as a managed service provider for Lenovo solutions. We look forward to building on this partnership as we continue to expand our business in the years ahead.” —Pedro Maia, Managing Director, IntDev