ECKD partners with Computacenter to design and implement a virtualised datacenter based on Cisco UCS technology

Customer challenge

EDV Centrum für Kirche and Diakonie GmbH (ECKD) is an IT service provider for churches, welfare and charity organisations in Germany. To cope with increasing customer demand, the company decided to implement a new virtualised server infrastructure that would offer high availability and enhanced environmental credentials.

Computacenter solution

ECKD partnered with Computacenter to design and implement the new datacenter environment, including storage and networking technologies.

Results

ECKD now has a reliable and dynamic virtualised datacenter environment based on the latest technologies. The Cisco UCS platform not only offers high availability and rapid provisioning of new customer services, but also has lower energy overheads.

Download case study

Customer profile

ECKD (EDV Centrum für Kirche and Diakonie GmbH) provides IT services for church-based organisations, including welfare and charity groups.

Business challenge

Historically, ECKD provided its services to church and welfare organisations via external datacenter providers. However, following a significant increase in demand for its services, the company decided to establish its own datacenter environment in Kassel, Germany.

ECKD's aim was to create a state-of-the-art facility taking advantage of VMware virtualisation technologies. Claus Will, a Datacenter Sales Specialist at Computacenter, comments: "To achieve an optimised virtual environment, ECKD needed a platform that would offer simple centralised management." As well as ease of management, it was important that the platform also offered scalability and had minimal power requirements.

Computacenter solution

ECKD partnered with Computacenter to design and implement a datacenter environment based on VMware vSphere and Cisco UCS technologies. Claus comments: "We were awarded the business due to our experience in virtualisation and Cisco partnership." The Cisco platform was selected due to its ability to simplify and centralise management of the virtualised server infrastructure. The new datacenter environment uses the Cisco Nexus 1000V Switch to enable intelligent network management.

Pre-defined configuration templates means that new customer services can be implemented quickly and easily. Michael Otto, IT Manager at ECKD, comments: "By separating physical and logical components with virtualisation we are able to support different customer applications in accordance with their computing and storage requirements."

The smaller physical infrastructure means it has lower cooling and power requirements and reduced hardware and support costs. ECKD customers ranging from small welfare charities to large church organisations are now able to use the datacenter to support all their applications – from financial management systems to collaboration software and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

Results

The virtualised datacenter enables ECKD to reduce administration and simplify IT management through centralised tools. New services can be deployed for customers in a matter of minutes. "Computacenter helped us ensure that the Cisco UCS environment would meet all our requirements now and going forwards," comments Michael. "As well as offering enhanced scalability and ease of management, the platform uses just a quarter of the energy of a conventional datacenter environment with the same computing capacity."