Lufthansa Technik is a world-wide leading provider of aircraft repair, overhaul and modification services for civil airforce, from commercial to VIP and special missions.

As the company’s mission is to take care about the safety in the sky, they need a robust IT infrastructure on the ground.

There are 5 essential locations (4 in Europe and 1 in Puerto Rico) for maintaining the Airbus A320 family and the Boeing 737 series (Classic and Next Generation). All their internal and external processes produce and host a lot of data. The IT must keep the applications running smoothly and securely 24/7.

By the time, Lufthansa Technik needed to  refresh their existing equipment and maximize system performance. The IT team explored the benefits of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), which accelerates data center modernization and simplifies its management.

 BUSINESS NEEDS

• Higher IT resiliency and efficiency
• Scalability for future expansion
• IT Cost reduction
• IT investment protection

THE CHALLENGE

• Aging legacy systems upgrade
• Virtualized IT environment
• 5 remote locations
• 1 month for deployment
• Disaster recovery solution
• Managed Services on top

Lufthansa Technik is embracing the digital transformation and we know how legacy systems can really slow companies down.

So, they wanted a partner who can optimize the IT management and provide scalable architecture. They needed to work with a very flexible team when it comes to all ITSM practices like service delivery, change management and project management.  The responses had to be handled in a timely manner.

A partner with real time capabilities to take everything from IT infrastructure assessment via design and evaluation of technologies, to migration and implementation.

The company has used another vendor for storage and compute in the past, but by the time they were looking for new solutions.

In addition, the deployment had to be completed in about a month.

THE PERFECT MATCH

Telelink Business Services emerged as the best choice with its experienced and dedicated Hybrid Cloud team and almost 20 years of providing Managed Services.

The company assists businesses, big and small, with customized IT system integrations. They could centralize, standardize, and secure Lufthansa Technik environment.

Moreover, Telelink Business Services is a Titanium Partner of Dell Technologies and also Principal Partner of VMware, implementing and supporting their solutions in several countries already.

The company team with their proactive approach in understanding the full requirements of client’s IT strategy, always walks an extra mile to deliver according and over the expectations. So, in this case even the 1-month time challenge seemed possible!

SOLUTION AT A GLANCE

The locations:

• Budapest, Hungary
• Luqa Area, Malta
• Aguadilla, Puerto Rico
• Shannon, Ireland
• Sofia, Bulgaria

In each location a HCI cluster is deployed:

• Dell EMC VxRail (P570)
• VMware vSAN (Standard)
• VMware vSphere Backup Solution

• Veeam Backup and Replication
• Veeam One
• PowerVault ME4 series

HCI – UP AND RUNNING

Telelink Business Services hybrid cloud team chose a Dell EMC VxRail solution for each location as it delivers virtualization, compute, and storage in a scalable, easy to manage, hyper-converged infrastructure appliance. The Appliance is built on Intel Xeon processor-based hardware with the VxRail Appliance software bundle, including VMware vCenter Server, VxRail Manager Plugin for VMware vCenter for configuration and management, VMware vSphere (including ESXi), VMware vSAN for storage.

The easy administration in VxRail using VMware vCenter Server was an important aspect for Telelink Business Services as it simplifies the lifecycle management. Compelling was the end-to-end support through Dell EMC as well as the scalability of the solution, allowing the IT team to add quickly new appliances / sites to match growth.

All the information was backed up and replicated to the central location for disaster protection. By design copies of the data were stored locally and replica was created on second site. The chosen backup software was Veeam Availability Suite Enterprise Plus, which is a bundled solution including: 1) Veeam Backup and Replication software integrated with VMware virtualization, and managing all local backups. And 2) Veeam One software for monitoring.

Telelink Business Services TAKES CARE OF IT ALL

Once, the 5 locations have been securely deployed, connected, flawlessly migrated and integrated, the time for Managed Services has come.

Telelink Business Services provided full 24×7 pro-active monitoring and support to Lufthansa Technik. It acted as a Single-point-of-contact (SPOC) for incident responses, resolutions, queries, and requests. The team assured every issue was prioritized accordingly, so the business moved on.

Being the backbone of company business for many years, hybrid cloud team helped Lufthansa Technik opt for pay-as-you-go model and required no upfront payment. OPEX financial model was chosen as the best one for both parties.

Lufthansa Technik got a partner big enough to offer highest quality of managed services worldwide, but small enough to be flexible to accommodate any reasonable changes to fit the required processes.

BUSINESS RESULTS

• Fully modernized and virtualized infrastructure. For a month!
• HCI solution for every location
• Fast deployment for just minutes
• Backup and disaster recovery solution
• Constant monitoring of devices’ life cycle and regular updates
• 24/7 Managed Services of the entire IT environment
• No upfront payment – OPEX scheme enabled

“This Telelink Business Services’ HCI solution helps us achieve scalability and integrate future enhancements coming from the increasing business complexity and market demands. Therefore, we got higher IT resiliency and efficiency”.

Rosen Rangelov, Program Lead Central IT Services at Lufthansa Technik Sofia

KEEP GOING

The smooth project completion and high customer satisfaction was a well-grounded base for Telelink Business Services – Lufthansa Technik partnership to grow across 17 countries now. The improved cross-team communication and knowledge sharing between the two companies built trust and confidence on a long run.