Challenge
Incorporated in 1905, this West Coast utility company is one of the nation's largest & oldest providers of gas & electric. The organization's age posed a challenge as they had a very legacy thought process when it came to managing the IT data center. The utility company maintains over 100,000 miles of electrical lines & 40,000 miles of gas pipelines, all of which are tracked & managed through the IT organization. After being sanctioned with causing wildfires in 2018, the utility provider was forced to file Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2019. After emerging from bankruptcy in 2020, the company came to WWT with goals that would help reduce operating costs while still providing their customers with a high level of service.
They ultimately were calling on WWT to address these critical problem areas:
- Improve the customers experience during PSPS events (public safety power shutoff) via a platform that consumer can engage with. PSPS events are required when there are dangers caused by the environment such as wildfires, high winds, mudslides, etc.
- Reduce the costs from $250 per month per virtual workload as well as improving the response time to business units on provisioning those workloads.
- Transformation of the operating model within the organization regarding how they utilize the IT environment internally to their advantage
Solution
The strategy presented to the customer was framed around the IT value model that helped guide the customer down the path of transforming their private cloud environment. The initial goal was to implement Infrastructure-as-a-service by 2021 to start the transition off private cloud. The next step throughout 2022 is to transition to a hybrid cloud model with a full multi-cloud environment being the end goal by 2024.
VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) deployed on VxRail was implemented to solve that infrastructure-as-a-service goal by 2021. The solution was stretched across two datacenters in the environment to provide vSAN failover capabilities. To change the current cloud operating model, WWT helped migrate two existing on-premises cloud environments made up of over 7,000 workloads to the new VCF environment. This would help consolidate their on-premises environments & help reduce operating costs while providing the framework needed to deploy VMware Tanzu & a hybrid cloud model through VMC on AWS.
Outcome
- Redundancy & recovery capabilities between on-prem & cloud infrastructure through VMware vSAN to be able to fail-over quickly between datacenters
- 75% reduction in cost per workload
- 90% reduction in workload provisioning time
