Objective
Meet customer demand and ensure
future business by oering managed
cloud services
Approach
HAVL already had HPE product
experience and a good relationship
with HPE after many years as an
HPE reseller. It only considered
HPE solutions and chose HPE
ConvergedSystem 700x af ter
seeing product demonstrations
Case Study
HAVL builds best-of-breed
managed cloud solution
HPE ConvergedSystem 700x supports a vital
new business venture for Dutch oice and
IT solutions provider
IT Matters
• Uses virtualisation to roll out new
servers in minutes rather than weeks,
providing flexible capacity planning for
this new business strand
• Provides a turn-key, converged
combination of HPE servers, storage,
networking and management software
• Supplies vital high availability with
backup data capable of being restored
in 15 minutes
Business Matters
• Reduces cost due to real-time capacity
planning, thin provisioning and
tiered storage
• Delivers Proactive Support and ease of
management which are vital as HAVL
launches this new service
• Provides the company with a scalable
new business strand to support
growth and future success
To meet growing customer
demands and grow its
business, Dutch oice
solutions company HAVL
decided to launch a
managed cloud computing
service. Since this was
a new and important
development for the
business, it needed a
world-class solution to
reduce risk and ensure
excellence. It chose to
implement the HPE
ConvergedSystem 700x
converged platform and is
already seeing the technical
and business benefits.
Challenge
Customer demand
Eighty years ago, Netherlands-based HAVL
was launched to sell basic oice supplies,
but it has come a long way since those days
of paperclips and desks. Thirty years ago
it branched out into IT solutions and now
it sells a whole work concept. Het Nieuwe
Werken (The New Work) is a total solution
designed to make working life better
for employees. It includes everything a
company needs from interior design
and training to oice equipment and,
of course, IT.
Located in the town of Tilburg, HAVL’s first
venture into IT was with Compaq, later
acquired by HPE. As an HPE reseller, it has a
long record of delivering HPE equipment
to a wide range of customers. HAVL’s
prolonged success relies on listening to its
customers, and recently they voiced some
strong messages.
Case study
HAVL
Industry
Oice and IT solutions
“Meeting customer demands by creating our own cloud with
HPE ConvergedSystem 700x was important to the future of the
company. If we hadn’t done this, it’s possible that HAVL would
not exist in ten years time.”
— Sander van Dijk, IT engineer and consultant, HAVL
Page 2
“We got a lot of requests from customers
who wanted to compare the costs of
buying new equipment against moving to
cloud computing,” says Sander van Dijk,
IT engineer and consultant with HAVL.
“Once they had examined the dierence
in costs, a lot of businesses decided that a
managed cloud solution was good for them.”
HAVL director, Ard Smulders adds: “The
delivery of managed cloud services is a
natural extension of HAVL’s ICT portfolio,
but we needed a world-class solution to
reduce risk and ensure excellence.”
Solution
Proactive support
HAVL decided to implement an HPE
ConvergedSystem 700x solution to support
its HPE CloudSystem environment. This
consists of an HPE ProLiant BladeSystem
c7000 Platinum Enclosure with seven
HPE ProLiant BL460c Gen8 server
blades running the HPE Matrix Operating
Environment. A scalable HPE FlexFabric
10GB/24 port module is centrally managed
using HPE Intelligent Management Center
software to support its HPE CloudSystem
environment.”
HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage 7200/7000
provides 48 disks, each with 450GB capacity,
thin provisioning and tiered storage. HAVL
uses RAID 5 storage technology to deliver a
total networked storage capacity of 14TB.
“We looked only at Hewlett Packard
Enterprise because as a reseller, we
have always had a good experience with
them,” explains van Dijk. “HPE gave us a
demonstration and we already had some
experience of HPE solutions. We had a good
feeling about HPE and our past experience
had been good, so why change it?”
Since HAVL is not a highly specialised IT
company, good product support for the
converged infrastructure was important so it
chose a three-year Proactive Care Service.
The resources in its cloud are virtualised
using the Microsoft® Hyper-V 2012 core
hypervisor with HPE Virtual Machine
Manager, HPE Data Protection Manager and
HPE Operations Manager. The minimum
operations environment for new virtual
machines is Windows® 2008 R2 or higher
but when customers are migrating from
their own environments to the HAVL cloud
then it’s possible to migrate to virtual
machines running Windows 2003 or higher.
Case study
HAVL
Industry
Oice and IT solutions
Page 3
The customer environments are accessed
through a Citrix Cloud Gateway powered
by XenApp 6.5 and XenDesktop 7 apps
and desktops.
HAVL is creating two dierent cloud
environments, which are managed by an
IT team of 15 people with some project
engineers and a helpdesk team of ten.
One is a multi-tenanted cloud that will be
used by smaller companies, and the other
is for larger companies who want a private
cloud. Private cloud users can have a choice
of security authentication levels but with the
multi-tenant cloud, authentication is fixed at
two-factor.
HAVL is using the enterprise mobility
management solution, Citrix CloudGateway,
and its customers have two ways of
connecting with the cloud. They can use
a site-to-site Virtual Private Network
(VPN) from their oice or can enjoy mobile
connectivity by choosing the Cloud
Gateway portal.
“With HPE ConvergedSystem 700x, we
have a redundant platform on one site but
we also have fibre connections to a second
data centre,” says van Dijk. “A customer
can choose to have a highly available
environment, and can choose to replicate
data to that other data centre. If one
fails we can have everything up and
running in 15 minutes.”
With the backup, customers can choose to
opt for a high availability solution or not but
the backup is made in the main data centre
and always replicated to the second data
centre. In addition, it is also written to tape
which goes to a third location.”
Benefits
Flexibility and scalability
Implementing HPE ConvergedSystem
700x has enabled HAVL to meet customer
demands as well as keep abreast of latest
trends, creating a new business strand that
will help with future growth and stability.
Since this is a new venture for HAVL,
the flexibility and easy management of
the HPE CloudSystem software running
on the HPE ConvergedSystem 700x are
vitally important. The HPE CloudSystem
software allows entire environments to be
automatically provisioned in just minutes.
“Virtualisation means that we can now roll
out new servers and build an environment
for a new customer in less than one day,
ready for data migration,” says van Dijk.
“This supports eicient capacity planning
because we create just enough virtual
servers for our existing customers and when
they become full, we will just add more.
At present we have created 20 virtual
machines but will soon make this 50 to
accommodate customers who have signed
up for the service.”
Case study
HAVL
Industry
Oice and IT solutions
Customer at a glance
Hardware
• HPE ConvergedSystem 700x
• HPE ProLiant BladeSystem c7000
Platinum Enclosure
• HPE ProLiant BL460c Gen 8
server blades
• HPE 3PAR StoreServ Storage
7020/7000
• HPE FlexFabric 10GB/24 port module
• Citrix CloudGateway portal
Software
• HPE CloudSystem software
(HPE Matrix Operating Environment)
• HPE Intelligent Management Center
HPE services
• HPE Proactive Care Service
“We selected HPE ConvergedSystem 700x because it
gives us a complete, future-ready solution that allows our
customers to benefit from scalable, aordable,
best-of-breed managed cloud services.”
— Ard Smulders, director, HAVL
This kind of lean provisioning keeps costs
down and further economies come from
the tiered storage in HPE 3PAR StoreServ
Storage 7000. Although HAVL has not
yet started to use this feature, it will mean
that the most active data can be stored on
rapidly accessible media while data that is
used less often is automatically moved to
lower, less expensive tiers. The HPE 3PAR
thin provisioning software also reduces
costs because HAVL only needs to purchase
the disk storage capacity it needs today,
eliminating the expense of buying for
the future.
The cloud oering is already creating
potential business growth for HAVL with
enquiries coming from companies it has not
dealt with before, and it was a safe business
decision as van Dijk explains: “Before we
agreed to buy this system from HPE we had
our first contract in, and that contract
was equal to half of the investment that
we made. We made some calculations based
on the costs and these indicated that this
was the new way to continue our business in
future years.”
Ease of management and eicient support
have also smoothed HAVL’s entry into this
new market.
“We are using HPE Intelligent Management
software for the monitoring of our network
content. It gives us detailed information
about the status of the infrastructure in
a single pane of glass. When there is a
problem it’s easy to identify,” says van Dijk.
“Since we do not have highly technical
specialists we realised if we did not have
the knowledge, we would have to buy it
so we signed a three-year HPE Proactive
Care Service agreement. This includes
remote monitoring of our systems so when
there is a problem, HPE will proactively call
and inform us about it and will fix it for us.
There is a four hour call-out and it’s good
to have the extra knowledge, support and
management. That’s why we chose HPE.”
Learn more at
hpe.com/go/convergedsystem/
virtualization
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© Copyright 2013-2015 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP. The information contained herein is subject to change
without notice. The only warranties for HPE products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying
such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HPE shall not be liable for
technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.
Microsoft and Windows are U.S. registered trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies.
4AA4-9600EEW, November 2015, Rev. 2
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