“Triangle delivered on all our objectives and we have the platform that provides cost savings through increased visibility on the estate that the vRealize suite of products facilitates. It is a robust, scalable and agile platform giving us the ability to control a complex and fast-changing environment.”
ESB is a leading Irish utility focused on providing excellent customer service, operating right across the electricity market; from generation, through transmission and distribution to supply. Their mission is to bring sustainable and competitive energy solutions to all customers and the company’s vision is to be Ireland’s foremost energy company. To achieve these goals the ESB identified the need to improve the way they run their business and the need to develop the capacity to deliver new services to their customers using digital and cloud technologies in a secure and cost-efficient manner.
The challenge was to develop a strategy that would leverage ESB’s existing investment by using their own on-premise private cloud and during periods of peak demand, they would utilise the public cloud for extra capacity. Adopting this hybrid IT strategy would help ESB to provide more services cost-effectively by adding the flexibility to deploy the best-in-class hardware, software, and services according to a specific business or application need.
Triangle had already helped ESB to implement a large virtualized environment of 2,000 virtual machines on 200 hosts and 50 clusters that runs 330 key production applications. Following on the success of this project and in order to achieve the goals of its hybrid IT strategy the ESB, in conjunction with Triangle, identified the requirement for a cloud management platform (CMP) to optimise and manage its cloud infrastructure for cost, security, and operations.
Triangle worked closely with ESB on how this project would progress. One of the key challenges for the project was that it spanned many different groups within the organisation: SAP, Network, Security, Linux, AIX, Storage, VMware, Microsoft and Cloud groups.
The solution can be broken down as follows:
“Managing this type of hybrid environment required a new set of management and deployment tools as well as a cross-functional team of skilled resources to enable a move towards a digital era, allowing us to develop our business services for our customers.”
The cloud management platform delivered a new set of management and deployment tools for the hybrid environment, supported by a cross-functional team of skilled resources to move ESB into the digital era to allow them to build new and better business services for their customers. The aims of the project were ambitious and included the implementation of the base cloud management platform as well as the creation of associated policies including cloud financial policies, process automation and automated services creation that would allow the ESB to assess, deploy and manage infrastructure no matter where it was placed in the hybrid environment.
