We offer the services of two state-of-the-art data centers with a target capacity of 42 MW. Data Center 2 is the only facility in the EU with the highest level of security confirmed by two independent bodies: ANSI/TIA-942 Rated 4 certification and EN 50600 Class 4 standard. We guarantee security, carrier neutrality, high energy efficiency and power supply with 100% green energy.
We are a secure data centers, cloud & Managed Services provider for European customers. We manage the only EU's data center with the highest level of security confirmed by two independent bodies: the ANSI/TIA-942 Rated 4 certification and the EN 50600 Class 4 standard.
“We have been cooperating with Beyond.pl for more than 6 years. Our partner fully delivers on the promises, ensuring the highest level of security for our system needs. We also appreciate the team’s proactive approach and extremely high level of service, which the previous operator could not provide. We see Beyond.pl as our partner, rather than our supplier. I am delighted that a Polish data center provider can meet the expectations of an international organization in terms of critical infrastructure maintenance”.
Kamil Lewandowski Head of IT Business Applications, NEVEON Group
NEVEON Group (ex Eurofoam Group) is a leading, global, integrated foam company offering outstanding flexible and composite polyurethane foams for a huge range of applications, from the comfort segment through the transportation sector to a limitless variety of specialty applications. NEVEON is part of Greiner and with its products pursues the goal of contributing to the enhancement of the quality of life worldwide. With 57 locations in 17 countries, the foam specialist guarantees customer proximity, the shortest delivery times and top quality. In the 2022 business year, NEVEON generated sales revenues of EUR 732 million and employed over 3,600 people.
For many years, company has been outsourcing colocation of its IT infrastructure. This model has been selected mainly because it ensures greater security at lower costs when compared to in-house/ on-premises colocation options. A turning point occurred in 2012 when the company decided to implement the SAP ERP system and centralize the colocation of its infrastructure. The company then engaged the services of an external data center provider from Vienna where they collocated its infrastructure used for SAP and its support applications, such as BI, Data Warehouse, or Business Process Management System. However, in 2018, due to unsatisfactory service quality and problems with maintaining business continuity in line with NEVEON’s requirements, the company decided to search for an alternative data center provider.
Due to the type of its business activity and the stringent requirements on production and logistics in the automotive sector, it was critical to ensure a high service level from its new data center provider to maintain business continuity and stable system performance. In addition, other important decision criteria related to the physical security of the selected site, the project’s TCO (the total cost of ownership of the service during the contract period), and the provider’s proactive approach to the realization of complementary managed services increasing the quality of the after-sales service support.
In a manufacturing entity that supplies products to brands such as BMW or Mercedes, every interruption, even a short one, generates exposure to major costs. If we cannot ensure product delivery on schedule, we may pay contractual fines. That is why we had to be certain that the data center services provided by our new partner would ensure the availability and stability of our integrated SAP production and logistics support systems – Kamil Lewandowski, Head of IT Business Applications, NEVEON Group.
NEVEON’s main goal was to ensure the stability of the integrated SAP ERP ECC 6.0 system, which is critical to a manufacturing company. Even a short interruption in the system’s availability may bring production and logistics to a halt. For a company in the automotive industry, an hour of downtime of an ERP-class system means millions in losses and penalties for delivery delays. Neveon’s future data center services supplier had to meet the highest service level guarantees for uptime, with minimized exposure to any downtime.
Due to the location of NEVEON’s IT competence center in Poland, company restricted the choice of its future partner to data center operators on the local market. During the supplier selection process, the company analyzed approximately 40 elements relating to the quality of services offered by the operator, data center security, and guarantees
– We persuaded the Board to migrate the SAP environment from Vienna to Poland, but first, we had to demonstrate that it was a well-considered choice and guarantee that the data center operator would ensure a superior level of security and business continuity. With this in mind, we exercised extreme diligence throughout the partner selection process – Kamil Lewandowski, Head of IT Business Applications, NEVEON Group.
A hybrid service from a single Partner: IaaS, private cloud, Disaster Recovery Center, migration.
The supplier evaluation was based on multiple criteria and was highly demanding. During the selection process, it turned out that the only supplier that met Neveon’s international corporate requirements was Beyond.pl with its Data Center 2 site in Poznan, Poland.
Data Center 2 conforms to the highest standards regarding physical security, guaranteed performance, and service. It is the only facility in the EU with the highest level of security confirmed by two independent bodies: ANSI/TIA-942 Rated 4 certification and EN 50600 Class 4 standard. The ANSI standards for data centers are the most comprehensive in the world and require the positive conclusion of an independent audit to obtain the formal certification. ANSI/TIA-942 certification includes elements such as power supply and cooling as well as all aspects related to a site’s location, fire security, physical security, and communications. The Rated 4 certification is the highest level achievable and requires a regular recertification audit, which Beyond.pl successfully completed in February 2020. A Rated 4 site offers 99.995% uptime, meaning downtime is limited to just 26 minutes per year. For comparison, Tier III standards allow for as much as 1 hour 34 minutes of downtime per year. The superior quality of Beyond.pl’s infrastructure was recognized by NEVEON in the selection process.
Most importantly, Beyond.pl was the only operator to offer a contract-binding guarantee of satisfactory uptime. The client was formally ensured with a specific response time for reporting and resolving issues.
An additional advantage was that the Data Center 2 facility is located near the western border of Poland, making it optimally connected in terms of network access and neutrality for maintaining Eurofoam’s IT infrastructure in six countries: Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, and Hungary. This ensures low latency to each of these countries.
– Before making our final decision, we visited Data Center 2 in Poznan. We were very much impressed by the site’s standards. Until then, we had not realized that such a world-class facility operated out of Poland. It turns out that the data center in Poznan offers a higher level of security than those of other providers selected by sister companies in Europe. After migrating our infrastructure to Beyond.pl, we noticed a higher after-sales service quality than our previous supplier. Thanks to our cooperation with Beyond.pl, our direct involvement in hardware maintenance is minimal. Everything works as it should – Kamil Lewandowski, Head of IT Business Applications, NEVEON Group.
A major strength of Beyond.pl is its comprehensive service offering, which includes IaaS and a full cloud package with all available models (public, private, global as well as hybrid), as well as SAP migration support.
Step one: SAP migration
Due to its high-quality corporate standards, NEVEON has a well-developed model for maintaining its SAP system. These models were to be implemented with the new operator. The SAP test and production systems were supported using dedicated Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and a Disaster Recovery Center for SAP environments based on VMware private cloud technology.
We implemented various solutions, going far beyond migrating large amounts of data within the SAP environment as quickly as possible. We analyzed the causes of the systems’ low performance and adjusted our operations to the external partner who supported Neveon’s systems at the time and who was being simultaneously replaced – Ryszard Bobrowski, Delivery Process and Project Manager w Beyond.pl.
The migration from the data center in Vienna to Data Center 2 in Poznan took only four months, from 1 July to 31 October 2018. It was completed in direct cooperation with a local partner who was responsible for supporting the maintenance and administration of the SAP systems.
Beyond.pl was responsible for: preparing, configuring, and installing dedicated hardware infrastructure (dedicated servers and arrays) for the purposes of NEVEON’s SAP environments (ERP, BI); creating and preparing virtual machines and network infrastructure; migration; acceptance and performance tests of the SAP environment; migration of secondary systems; and the launch of the SAP production environment.
Disaster Recovery Center in a VMware private cloud
NEVEON required end-to-end security for its infrastructure. The company also wanted guaranteed solutions in case of failures, with the option of quick recovery of access to its production systems. Beyond.pl was tasked with creating a Business Continuity Plan as a Disaster Recovery Center (DRC) service.
For this purpose, Beyond.pl launched a dedicated private cloud based on VMware technology at Data Center 1, connected through a private fiber optic ring network with Data Center 2. The facilities are located approximately 5 km from each other, thanks to which the data transfer time is measured in nanoseconds. Beyond.pl designed the DRC environment for the SAP system to provide replication and a short failover time. As part of the service, Beyond.pl developed emergency procedures and tests to minimize data loss risk and protect against the negative impact of core infrastructure failures. The Disaster Recovery Center enables business continuity in the event of a failure thanks to maintaining a fixed pool of IT resources in a private cloud and synchronizing corporate data. In case of an emergency, NEVEON’s IT systems will instantly fail over from one data center to another, so NEVEON is free to operate from the backup site as long as necessary.
Two years of successful cooperation
As NEVEON was satisfied with the quality and stability of the services provided by Beyond.pl, the partners extended the scope of their cooperation. In February 2020, two years after the first contract was signed, Beyond.pl expanded shared storage for the dedicated VMware cloud, due to increased demand for backup storage in the group and new requirements related to email system migration.
Currently, Beyond.pl maintains NEVEON’s SAP ERP, SAP BI, and SAP BPM solutions, email servers, domain controllers, MSSQL and Sharepoint databases, and IT support systems. It has also started migrating the test environments to the shared cloud.
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