Polenergia Dystrybucja launches hybrid IT infrastructure management model delivered by Beyond.pl – a strategic technology partner

Polenergia Dystrybucja launches hybrid IT infrastructure management model delivered by Beyond.pl – a strategic technology partner.

Polenergia Dystrybucja owned by the largest private energy group in Poland has implemented a hybrid IT infrastructure management model. Concurrently it has become the first company in Poland to roll out the HPE GreenLake cloud solution. Polenergia’s technology partner is Beyond.pl, who is responsible for the delivery of a comprehensive colocation and cloud services solution. 

The decision to implement a hybrid model of IT infrastructure management by Polenergia Dystrybucja is a result of an analytical and consulting project realized together with the support of Beyond.pl experts. Polenergia’s company strategy for the next 5 years was analyzed in cooperation with business and IT representatives of Polenergia. One of the growth pillars of Polenergia is expected to come from a significant increase in the number of customers over time and accompanying growth in the number of internal and external applications deployed to support the business and service delivery. Polenergia aimed to find an optimal model to secure processing power and storage capacity for future needs, without being able to precisely define the exact timing and scale of these needs due to their dependency on growth. Polenergia also strived  to optimize infrastructure requirements to handle “standard” compute needs as well as cyclical and seasonal peaks resulting from the specifics of the business. Hence, the new model for IT infrastructure had to ensure the highest levels of security and availability of services, be capable to scale up and down on the fly to meet seasonal needs, and support growth ambitions, while concurrently being optimized in terms initial investment and long-term costs. Based on this scoping requirement, Beyond.pl presented four alternative delivery models: private cloud, IaaS, colocation and a hybrid scenario made up of a mix of colocation and VMware private and public cloud. The hybrid model was selected as it met all the requirements and additionally proved to be 30% cheaper than the other scenarios, significantly reducing investment into the IT infrastructure.

– Our goal was to design an IT solution that is optimal from a business and financial perspective, supporting our long-term development goals. According to our investment plan for 2021-2026, we want to expand our customer base to 80.000, significantly increase our market share, introduce new services and continue our digital transformation. Rational spend in the area of technology on the system, application, and infrastructural level will allow us to achieve our strategic objectives” – says Krzysztof Pubrat, CEO of Polenergia Dystrybucja. Any company with growth ambitions and undergoing a digital transformation faces the unknowns of IT infrastructure requirements that come from the growth of data processed. Therefore, it is extremely important to consciously select the optimal IT infrastructure deployment model. We were convinced by the hybrid model presented as it guarantees security and availability of current workload requirements but also provides the flexibility to handle scalability and on-demand growth and reduces the initial investment to deploy the solution and the ongoing cost in the future.

First cloud on HPE GreenLake in Poland

Beyond.pl will deliver IT infrastructure services to Polenergia Dystrybucja via a hybrid model through a combination of colocation and VMware private and public cloud services. Beyond.pl has taken over the responsibility ensuring that temporary increases in demand for computing power, which at Polenergia are cyclical and are related to, among others, monthly billing processes are supported with adequate infrastructure. These peak demand needs will be supported by VMware public cloud deployed in an on-demand and pay-as-you-go model. This is possible thanks to the HPE GreenLake technology platform hosted in Data Center 2 in Poznan, Poland which guarantees the highest level of service availability supported by the ANSI/TIA-942 certification at the Rated 4 level. In the event of expected growth in demand for computing power resulting from the implementation of new systems and applications, and increase in the customer base, coming into fruition Beyond.pl ensures the ability to support the infrastructure needs in real time. This is possible thanks to a permanent safety stock of HPE GreenLake servers and storage equipment, which are maintained in Beyond.pl data centers and made available when needed. Polenergia Dystrybucja is the first company in Poland to deploy cloud services on HPE GreenLake.

– Businesses are increasingly dependent on technology, and ongoing digital transformation leads to a significant increase in IT solutions deployed by companies. Obviously, this is challenging as these  companies need to ensure security in combination with business continuity on the one hand, and optimize costs and be able to support increases  in workload demand without any delays impacting business on the other. The optimal solution frequently turns out to be one based on a hybrid deployment model. This scenario allows to deploy solutions that combine colocation with the cloud in any form, while minimizing the unnecessary upfront investment in hardware. This approach allows customers to leverage the strengths of each solution while being able to incur infrastructure related costs in a pay-per-use or monthly models, notes Wojciech Stramski, Beyond.pl CEO.

As part scope in the deployment of these services to Polenergia, Beyond.pl has taken on the responsibility to launch the colocation and cloud services. Beyond.pl is responsible for the delivery of newserver and storage equipment for colocation purposes, migration of systems from the current to new infrastructure, support and project management of new hardware purchase and delivery processes, onboarding and installation of hardware in the data center in Poznan Poland,, coordination of work of external software vendors cooperating with the client, IT administration, network management, server and storage license delivery, and backup as a service.

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About Polenergia Dystrybucja: Polenergia Dystrybucja acts as an independent distribution system operator (DSO) based on a decision issued by the President of the Energy Regulatory Office. The company belongs to the Polenergia Group, the largest Polish private energy group, listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. It currently distributes and sells energy to more than 18,000 customers throughout Poland, with an annual volume of distributed energy of 290.5 GWh. The company aims at maintaining friendly, flexible and success-oriented relations with its customers and ensuring the highest standard of services.

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• Polenergia Dystrybucja launches hybrid IT infrastructure management model delivered by Beyond