T-Mobile Czech Republic, a member of the international telecommunications group Deutsche Telekom, was running out of room. The integrated operator, which has been operating in the Czech market for more than 20 years, was frequently running into problems with storing data. A diverse family of hardware products — from servers to external storage — made scaling difficult and maintenance expensive. For a telecommunications organization tasked with providing quality connections to its customers, this couldn’t last.
“Our customers wanted a storage solution that was simple and could grow on demand, and we needed a solution that could add capacity and performances as needs increased,” Daniel Bajkai, Customer Solutions Designer at T-Mobile Czech Republic, said.
To solve this storage and storage management challenge, T-Mobile Czech Republic turned to its longtime partner, VMware. Building off of its prior VMware virtualization deployment, T-Mobile decided to use VMware vSAN to manage storage from vCenter, VMware’s central management interface. Doing so enabled T-Mobile Czech Republic to enjoy the benefits of vSAN software-defined storage features without additional virtual machines or requiring an installation. It also enabled the organization to bring easy visibility into its servers, switches and storage while managing its IaaS and PaaS services.
Now, if a problem arises, T-Mobile Czech Republic can leverage vSAN and vCenter to quickly and easily address the issue with the tools, skillsets, hardware and software it already knows. In one fell swoop, T-Mobile simplified everything storage and storage management related: it cut down on management costs, laid down the foundation for easy and rapid scaling at a lower cost and passed its newfound benefits onto its customers.
By simplifying its storage infrastructure, T-Mobile Czech Republic reduced its rack space, power consumption and management costs and added an important feature for customers: the industry’s first native HCI security with data-at-rest encryption. That means customers can enjoy more protection and replication without the risk of exposing data. No self-encrypting drives necessary.
VMware’s solutions, from vSAN to vCenter, are major drivers of T-Mobile Czech Republic’s growth, and it will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. The organization, as Bajkai notes, is committed to evolving to meet customer needs and actively training its teams through workshops, labs and more. And just in time, too. T-Mobile is already exploring options to deploy NSX and provide its own all-flash vSAN with deduplication and compression — innovations that’ll continue to simplify and push the boundaries of virtualization.
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