Key Challenges
- Remote IT team managing technical resources at manufacturing facilities around the world
- Existing IT environment was complex and difficult to manage
- Technology debt - average age of server was between 8-10 years old
- Management of legacy virtualization software was expensive and complex, ongoing training and education needed to maintain systems was time consuming
Business benefits
- Standardization of systems in remote manufacturing sites makes deployment, implementation, and maintenance of 300 VMs simple
- Onsite IT staff able to focus on other strategic projects
- Decreased downtime
- Reduced spend
Benchmark Electronics - global provider of engineering, design, and manufacturing services
Benchmark provides comprehensive solutions across the entire product life cycle; leading through its innovative technology and engineering design services; leveraging its optimized global supply chain; and delivering world-class manufacturing services in commercial aerospace, defense, advanced computing, next generation telecommunications, complex industrials, medical, and semiconductor capital equipment. Benchmark's global operations include facilities in seven countries and its common shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol BHE.
Former IT environment
The manufacturing sites were due a refresh and IT leadership was looking to reduce spend and simplify IT operations. The longer term strategy to have a centralized and standard IT infrastructure at each site globally was impossible to achieve with the existing legacy IT environment.
IT leadership saw the opportunity to create a more strategic and cost effective IT infrastructure as they went about making up their technology debt at their global manufacturing facilities.
Scale Computing HyperCore – Introduction, Selection and Implementation
Stacy Black, Director of Infrastructure & Operations at Benchmark Electronics, Inc., had seen Scale Computing demonstrated at an IT event and thought that the capabilities and overall lighter footprint could help them realize their centralized IT strategy. She asked an IT manager to do an independent review of SC//HyperCore versus competitors. The team decided that SC//HyperCore met their needs and would become the standard IT operations platform for their worldwide manufacturing facilities. The reasons the team decided on Scale Computing was for SC//HyperCore’s performance and uptime improvements, backup capabilities, cost savings, and the expectation of being able to spend less time managing its distributed enterprise IT infrastructure.
The IT organization found the implementation to be simple. SC//HyperCore is now the infrastructure for their SQL Server, Oracle, Windows, Solidworks, and some custom java and HTML applications with 300 VMs running on Scale Computing worldwide. When implementing at a new manufacturing facility the corporate IT team ships SC//HyperCore to the site where they do a remote install with minimal onsite IT expertise required.
“We have standardized on Scale Computing at our remote sites because those clusters are easy to manage and deploy. We have reduced our spend and saved a great deal of time not have to train staff on legacy virtualization, as well as not having to spend time managing multiple vendors.” - Stacy Black, Director of Infrastructure & Operations at Benchmark Electronics, Inc.
The Benefits
By combining servers, virtualization and management into a single product, SC//HyperCore greatly simplifies maintenance and management. This provides significant savings in staff costs and time spent on the system. Because SC//HyperCore includes its own hypervisor, there is no requirement for VMware architects or administrators, delivering yet another saving for the company.
The scalability of the technology makes it easy for the IT team to add nodes in different locations around the company’s operations with minimum local configuration and customization required. The initial deployments of Scale Computing solved Benchmark Electronics goal of achieving IT uniformity and automation.
"When I needed them, Scale Computing said ‘how can I help you?’ I could not be more appreciative of the help from Scale Computing."