Autostrada Wielkopolska is migrating its entire infrastructure to a private cloud at Beyond.pl

Autostrada Wielkopolska has decided to implement a private cloud solution which has replaced the company’s physical server infrastructure.

The relevant consulting services, migration plan, and maintenance of assets in a VMware cloud are provided by Beyond.pl, a provider of secure data center and cloud computing services.

Autostrada Wielkopolska has maintained its IT infrastructure in a mixed infrastructure model for many years. The company had been mainly using colocation and  dedicated infrastructure services hosted in Beyond.pl’s data center in Poznan, Poland. This year the customer took a decision to migrate in full its IT infrastructure to a private cloud.

– The main goal of the new approach was to simplify the management of our own hardware, including the monitoring of the fees paid to manufacturers and license providers. We wanted to optimize our internal processes without compromising the security standards applied to our IT infrastructure – says Krzysztof Andrzejewski, member of the board of Autostrada Wielkopolska.

A complete cloud migration and reverse colocation

After analyzing the client’s needs, Beyond.pl suggested migrating the assets hosted in colocation and in the dedicated infrastructure to a VMware private cloud. VMware private cloud. In addition, Beyond.pl provided a six-year commitment to ensure that the cloud services are delivered on  hardware that would not be older than 5 years, which in turn gives the client a guarantee of access to the most up to date  IT equipment without the need to pay any additional fees during the course of the cooperation. At the same time, Autostrada Wielkopolska benefited from Beyond.pl’s “reverse colocation” solution , offered to businesses within the framework of the COVID support package which involved having Beyond.pl acquiring all of the existing IT hardware of the client.

One of the main assumptions of the newly deployed cooperation model was to ensure that the existing levels of security and availability of critical IT systems was maintained. Most of Autostrada Wielkopolska’s infrastructure is therefore maintained in a private cloud hosted in Data Center 2 which is one of the three most secure data centers in all of Europe. Data Center 2 has been awarded the Rated 4 ANSI/TIA-942 certificate, which is a guarantee of service continuity (uptime) at the level of 99.995% per year. Furthermore, Autostrada Wielkopolska selected to maintain  backup related infrastructure and a portion of back-office related assets Beyond.pl’s Data Center 1, which is located only 14 km away from the main campus.

– Companies find it increasingly difficult to maintain the balance between operational continuity and the predictability of IT costs. When we were analyzing our client’s business models and operational requirements, we ended up recommending an infrastructure maintenance model that took into account the importance of security while concurrently allowing to minimize the risk of occurrence of unexpected expenses. In case of scale, and a resulting rapid increase in the requirement for additional computing power we are able meet the customer’s demands as our Data Center infrastructure is prepared to handle such situations of increased demand from our clients – says Wojciech Stramski, CEO of Beyond.pl.

From start to finish in two months

From May 2021, Autostrada Wielkopolska’s server infrastructure which hosts  its development and testing environments as well the AD, DNS, DHCP domain controllers, file servers, database machines, and routers has been maintained in a private cloud hosted in Beyond.pl’s Data Center 2.

– Migrating the entire infrastructure to a VMware private cloud hosted by Beyond.pl has been very reassuring not only because of the Rated 4 certification of the service provider’s data centers and cloud competence but also because of the scalability of the adopted cloud solution and the predictability of fixed monthly costs and the prospect of savings in the long run – concludes Krzysztof Andrzejewski, member of the board of Autostrada Wielkopolska.

Krzysztof Andrzejewski, Member of the Board of Autostrada Wielkopolska

The new infrastructural model designed by Beyond.pl also took into account the optimization of connectivity. Provided the close proximity of Data Center 2 to Autostrada Wielkopolska’s premises, the two facilities have been connected by means of a dark fiber network, which made it possible to reroute the entire network traffic directly to Data Center 2.

Beyond.pl delivered the entire migration project in just two months, and the service unavailability (downtime) during the transfer of data from Autostrada Wielkopolska’s systems to the target cloud solution was limited to under an hour.

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Autostrada Wielkopolska S.A. is an international concession company established in 1992. Its areas of operation include e.g. taking care of the condition of the road surface, managing road safety, designing new road solutions, and collecting tolls on the A2 motorway section running from Nowy Tomyśl to Konin. Together with Autostrada Wielkopolska II S.A., it administers and manages a total of 255 kilometers of the A2 motorway. It is the biggest project in Poland carried out by a public-private partnership. In 2009, Autostrada Wielkopolska received the “Leader of the Polish Transformation” award, awarded by Forbes to the best restructured and managed companies operating in the area of infrastructure and construction.

 

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