Hyper Converged Infrastructure
- Customer
- GDex Berhad
- Project manager on the customer side
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- IT Provider
- MSE DotNet Sdn. Bhd.
- Year of project completion
- 2024
- Project timeline
- January, 2024 - March, 2024
- Project scope
- 120 man-hours
- Goals
- Replace one of the world's most recognised HCI to another HCI to achieve significant cost saving, yet does not compromise on any features being used and does not affect operatiions.
- Project Results
- Yearly maintenance saved about 95%
The uniqueness of the project
- Bold decision to switch from a proven infrastructure to a more cost-effective solution: one of the first to replace entire core system HCI to Sangfor HCI
- Significant savings with high performance: The transition reduced licensing costs by nearly $290,000 annually, while maintaining system quality—an achievement not often seen with large-scale changes.
- Safe transition with minimal downtime: Despite the system’s critical role in 24/7 operations, the transition was planned and executed without disrupting the company’s operations.
- Used software
- Sangfor HCI
- Difficulty of implementation
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- Complexity of replacing the core system with minimal downtime: As the system was critical for 24/7 operations, the transition required minimizing planned downtime and managing associated risks.
- Management skepticism: Leadership was initially hesitant to replace a trusted platform. Overcoming this required extensive data analysis, risk management, and strong justification of cost-benefit.
- Project Description
- GDEX Bhd core systems comprising more than 50 virtual machines have for many years been powered by one of the world's best Hyper-Converged Infrastructure systems. It costs our company more than 300K USD annually just to renew the licenses. Being the core system, it is highly difficult to replace it, especially when our operations run 24/7. However, being a CIO, I felt this annual recurring license fee could have been better spent and started looking for alternatives more than 12 months ago. That is where I have done my research together with our team and finally decided that Sangfor HCI are capable, highly cost efficient and with minimum downtime in transition. The management was highly skeptical at first when I proposed. Operations have been running fine and they have confidence in the top HCI brand that we have been paying for all the while. It took me lots of data and discussion to prove a point of cost versus benefits plus the risk management in changing the core system's underlying technology. SANGFOR team together with our vendor, MSE DotNet, has planned meticulously well and managed to complete the transition seamlessly with very minimal planned downtime within a 3 months period. The overall investment into this transition is less than 100K USD for the first year and less than 10K USD per year for license and support renewal. This is a significant cost saving to our company and has also been a showcase success story for Sangfor. Our operations have been running well with Sangfor HCI and management has been appreciative that I push forward a complicated project which no other companies dare to, and we managed to save at least 290K USD every year.
- Project geography
- Malaysia
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