The experience of a global logistics company—NDA
How a Global Logistics Company Slashed Its IT Infrastructure Costs
About the Client
Our client is a global logistics company with an extensive network of hubs and temporary storage warehouses across Europe, North, and South America. It specializes in multimodal transportation and supply chain management and provides warehousing services for major corporate clients.
Its operations depend critically on the uninterrupted performance of its IT systems. These include its Warehouse Management System (WMS), Transportation Management System (TMS), and customer-facing portals for order management. Due to its geographically distributed business and the need for 24/7 service availability, the company's IT infrastructure requires high levels of fault tolerance and manageability.
Project Background
At the outset of the project, the company's IT infrastructure was a complex, heterogeneous environment largely shaped by past acquisitions and periods of rapid, uncoordinated growth. Management was centralized through a single corporate data center at headquarters. However, several critical regional hubs in South America and Europe relied on isolated server racks.
The infrastructure consisted of 36 physical servers purchased at different times, many of which were nearing the end of their service life and showed a high degree of wear and tear. The virtualization layer was fragmented and ran on a mix of platforms, creating management overhead. While VMware vSphere served as the primary platform, several branch offices relied on a heavily customized open-source solution that was difficult to support and posed a significant security risk.
Challenges
The complex and fragmented IT landscape combined with a sharp shift in external market conditions created interconnected problems that directly impacted business processes and company operations.
The existence of this fragmented virtualization environment meant the infrastructure was not a unified asset but a collection of disconnected technology silos. This prevented the company from implementing consistent management, security, and automation standards. Deploying and scaling services across different branches required separate scripts and procedures for each platform, which hindered business development.
As a result, the company faced a situation where its IT infrastructure had transformed from a business enabler into a source of systemic financial and operational risk. A strategic solution was required—one that would not only reduce costs but also consolidate management, increase fault tolerance, and lay the foundation for global growth.
Project Goals and Objectives
The project's primary goal was to create a modern, flexible, and cost-effective virtualization platform aligned with the company's long-term business strategy.
The client required a solution that would:
- Drastically reduce infrastructure costs through a transparent and predictable licensing model.
- Enable rapid adaptation to changing business needs and accelerate the rollout of new services.
- Deliver the full spectrum of required virtualization platform features within a secure, isolated environment.
- Seamlessly integrate solutions from ISPsystem as well as products from other vendors into the infrastructure.
Solution Requirements
Transparent and Cost-Effective Licensing
A primary goal was to eliminate the risks of vendor lock-in and unpredictable future costs. The solution required a clear licensing model that would not lead to exponential cost growth during scaling.
Ability to Operate in an Isolated Environment
It was critical for the entire virtualization stack to be deployed and function within a closed perimeter, without requiring access to a public network.
High Level of Fault Tolerance
The platform needed to provide built-in mechanisms for ensuring high infrastructure availability and business continuity.
Scalability
The solution's architecture had to be designed for high loads and allow for seamless expansion of computing capacity.
Seamless Migration Capability
To minimize operational risks, a convenient and reliable mechanism was required for migrating existing virtual machines from the legacy VMware platform to VMmanager without incurring downtime.
Project Implementation
Following a thorough market analysis and a successful pilot deployment, the company selected the VMmanager virtualization platform.
The project was supported by expert-level technical assistance in English, with ISPsystem engineers overseeing all implementation stages—from planning and migration to the initial configuration of high-availability clusters. Leveraging VMmanager's built-in VM import functionality and the active assistance of ISPsystem's technical team, the client achieved a seamless transfer of IT services and business applications to the new virtual environment. This enabled the entire migration process to be completed during normal operations, without any downtime for critical business processes.
The availability of comprehensive technical documentation in both English and Spanish allowed the company's IT specialists from various regional offices to quickly master the platform's functionality, understand its architectural specifics, and implement VMmanager operational best practices. Combined with the platform's Spanish-language control panel interface, this created a fully localized working environment. This significantly accelerated employee onboarding and minimized human error, particularly in the company's branches located throughout South America.
Key Features of the Implemented Solution
Based on the analysis of the existing challenges and the company's strategic objectives, the proposed solution had to meet several key requirements:
High Scalability
The VMmanager platform is built on a highly scalable architecture. A single installation can manage over 22,000 virtual machines, 50+ clusters, and 350+ physical servers. The environment can be scaled even further by deploying additional platform instances. This capability laid the foundation for years of IT infrastructure growth without the need for a costly technological stack replacement.
Platform and Cluster-Level Fault Tolerance
Thanks to its Unbreakable Clusters feature, VMmanager guarantees a high level of fault tolerance. If a node fails, the platform automatically migrates VMs to healthy servers within seconds, ensuring uninterrupted operational workflows. In practice, this allowed the company to guarantee the continuous operation of mission-critical applications.
On-Demand Scalability Under Load
The mechanism for seamlessly adding new hosts to a cluster, coupled with automatic load balancing, provided the client with a tool for rapid response to peak loads. This allows the IT department to quickly and without interruption increase capacity, while the platform's built-in load balancer ensures resources are distributed evenly without service disruption.
Centralized Infrastructure Monitoring
The built-in monitoring system provided the IT department with a unified dashboard to track key health metrics of the virtual environment. This significantly reduced diagnostic time, while proactive alerts for threshold violations helped prevent potential failures before they could impact operations.
Operation in an Isolated Environment
The ability to be deployed in a closed perimeter ensured full compliance with the strict information security requirements of the company and its partners, without any loss of platform functionality.
Ensuring Service Continuity
Features like automated load distribution (DRS) and the ability to adjust VM parameters without downtime enabled the business to perform routine maintenance and scale computing power for resource-intensive tasks without stopping services or applications.
Results and Future Plans
The implementation of the VMmanager virtualization management platform allowed the client not only to resolve existing issues but also to elevate the company's IT infrastructure to a new level of quality.
Cost Reduction
Annual virtualization platform ownership costs were reduced by over 18.3% compared to the previous solution. Licensing expenses are now predictable and are not affected by future infrastructure scaling.
Enhanced Fault Tolerance and Reduced Operational Risk
The deployment of a fault-tolerant cluster architecture and centralized monitoring has minimized downtime for critical services. Furthermore, it enabled a shift to a proactive infrastructure management model, allowing the team to identify potential bottlenecks and prevent disruptions before they impact business processes.
Increased Flexibility
Thanks to readily available integrations and a flexible API, the client now has the foundation to seamlessly connect the platform with other ISPsystem solutions, as well as any third-party software in the future.