Case Study
ALPLA improves server
uptime and business continuity
Objective
Plan and execute a five-year
IT strategy to match global business
requirements, centralizing services,
improving server and email uptime
and establish new, state-of-the-art
data centers in two locations
Approach
Sought a supplier to provide a global
overview of its IT infrastructure. As a
long-time buyer of HPE servers, it sought
the advice from HPE Technology Servers
IT Matters
• Identified and prioritized 150
IT issues to be addressed, creating
proof-of-concepts for every step of
the transformation
• Created always-on access to global
email, improving communication and
speeding decision making
• Centralized global Microsoft® Exchange
server to reduce power, complexity and
management costs
• Removed local tape-based backup,
securing data storage with a
centralized system
• Modernized server fleet, increasing
availability meaning greater uptime
for business
Business Matters
• Created and executed a five-year
IT infrastructure strategy in line with
business requirements, securing
involvement of C-level management
• Consolidated supplier count, to
reduce management costs and
business complexity
by centralizing data centers
HPE Technology Services assesses the entire
business to develop a five-year IT strategy
ALPLA is possibly the
biggest company you’ve
never heard of. Its products
can be found in almost every
household in the developed
world and it generated sales
of €2.84 billion in 2011. Yet it
is hardly a household name.
Challenge
The need for a global overview
The Austrian plastics manufacturer produces
packaging solutions for the world’s biggest
Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) brands,
including Coca Cola, Unilever and P&G. From
bleach to motor oil, fabric conditioner to
ketchup, the chances are ALPLA designs and
manufactures the packaging. It has 148 factories
in 39 countries and continues to expand,
particularly in China and South America.
This global presence coupled with
increasingly close ties to its customers (many
of which have inhouse ALPLA manufacturing
facilities) presents several IT challenges.
The business has grown o the back of a
decentralized IT infrastructure, with local
data centers serving production and logistic
facilities all around the world. The result is an
infrastructure that is serviced by a mixed bag
of suppliers, inconsistent and hard to monitor.
Case study
ALPLA
Industry
Manufacturing
“There is greater availability of systems within the production and supply
chain and it is much easier to implement new services. It has matched the
IT function with the needs of the ALPLA organization.”
— Stefan Berchtold, corporate IT system engineer and project manager, ALPLA
Page 2
“Standardization is our biggest challenge,” says
Klaus P. Metzler, CIO and project sponsor, ALPLA.
“We needed to identify which services we could
centralize – in economic as well as performance
terms – and then consolidate.”
ALPLA’s Corporate IT Systems team of seven
(Stefan Berchtold, Matthias Fink, Johann
Foedeles, Christian Putz, Daniel Schrom,
Stefan Toeerl and Michael Wakolbinger) are
responsible for the company’s corporate IT
systems, including communication, security
and network services. With the infrastructure
hardware due for replacement (a previous IT
strategy was drawn up, inhouse, in 2003),
Berchtold says it was evident the business
needed to do more than just buy like-for-like
replacements, though he was unclear what
the new vision would look like: “There was an
opportunity to improve our servers and
services but who would be able to support
us in such a project?”
Needing an overview of all aspects of the
IT infrastructure, Berchtold realized he would
need to upgrade to a global rather than local
partner, ideally one with experience of similar
projects. Previously, local specialists served
each specialist function – email services,
network, Active Directory.
“We knew these wouldn’t have the scale to
create a global vision within the same time
frame,” says Berchtold. “That’s when we were
introduced to Hewlett Packard Enterprise.”
HPE was a server supplier to the business,
but ALPLA was unaware of its consulting
services. Crucially, says Berchtold, HPE was
able to provide references. “It’s a huge
company with global presence – and it
had done a similar project with the Austrian
Embassies around the world. That we could
see this in action made us comfortable
allowing HPE to present its case.”
Solution
Workshops to clarify business objectives
To gain a complete view of ALPLA’s
requirements, HPE set about organizing
a series of workshops, establishing a
five-year IT strategy. “It wasn’t that we
were blind to the IT challenge,” says
Berchtold, “but HPE did a great job in
bringing us together as an organization.
The workshops involved SharePoint
services, business intelligence, ERP systems
– departments we hadn’t necessarily covered
in the past. And what did we find out? That
we all wanted the same things.”
Case study
ALPLA
Industry
Manufacturing
Page 3
“Previously, IT told the organization which
systems they could use. Now business is even
more aligned with IT.”
The workshops established a long-list of
more than 100 topics to be addressed,
grouped into 15 themes. The process
clarified several objectives:
• Centralize services where possible,
consolidate globally
• Improvement in email uptime
• Proactive monitoring of system
performance, including regional
management of servers
• Consistent helpdesk support
• Secure backup for Business
Continuity Management
• Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
requiring new, redundant data centers
• Create new set of Service Level
Agreements (SLAs).
“Email is the biggest concern for users. If mail
is oline we’ll lose a lot of money, it’s that
simple,” says Berchtold. “How much is hard to
say, but we need to close a deal, fix a price or
make a market intervention at any given
moment, anywhere in the world. If email is
down it has an impact on our daily operation.”
With bringing up Microsoft System Center
Operations (SCOM) and HPE Systems Insight
Manager we’re now able to proactively
identify issues in our IT environment and
investigate instead of doing stu reactively.
Local, tape-based backups were also
found to be ineective, leaving business
continuity exposed. “We had too many bad
experiences,” says Berchtold.
“Tapes not being replaced and tapes being
not kept in a standardized place. We needed
to remove backup from the local plant.”
Benefits
Replace, consolidate, centralize
With HPE uncovering the weak points in
ALPLA’s IT infrastructure, and the findings
fed back to management, that pressure,
long absent, was now evident. “Doing
everything in one go would be too much
for us. We needed HPE to put it all together,
to have a consolidated view of all domains
and a step-by-step project approach to
realize the whole program and make sense
of the project. This wouldn’t have been
possible using dierent specialists for
each domain,” says Berchtold.
As the project plan was put in place, HPE
began work on proof-of-concepts. The first
task was to replace and consolidate server
hardware at branch locations. In place of 140
local servers, two new, high-availability data
centers were built in Austria and Germany,
30km apart, to host centralized services
including a Microsoft Exchange server. This
solved ALPLA’s email issues and provided
always-on access to email, calendars and
contacts, regardless of device or location.
Case study
ALPLA
Industry
Manufacturing
Customer at a glance
Hardware
• HPE StoreOnce Backup System
Software
• HPE Data Protector
• Microsoft Systems Center Operations
Manager 2012
• Microsoft System Center 2007/2012
• Microsoft Exchange 2010
• HPE System Insight Manager
• Microsoft Windows® Server 2008 R2
HPE services
• HPE Technology Consulting Services
• HPE Support Services
• HPE Critical Facility Services
• HPE Microsoft Consulting Services
In addition to the hardware, HPE Critical
Facility Services Experts designed both
facilities, including power management,
electrical installations, cabling, air
conditioning, raised floor, fire detection and
extinguishing system as well as a radio-link
solution to replicate data between sites.
“Previously, we could only be reactive. We
were informed the email was down, we’d
investigate and fix,” says Berchtold. “Now,
with the Microsoft SCOM server we have
ongoing monitoring, patching and predictive
failure testing.”
The whole infrastructure is now monitored by
Microsoft SCOM 2012, providing a singular view
of operations. The plan is to split by geography,
giving ALPLA local visibility in each of its eight
regions with HPE providing ‘follow the sun’
support. HPE backup application, HPE Data
Protector, is used to control backups now. Tape
has been replaced by HPE disk-based backup
with deduplication, HPE StoreOnce Backup.
Tape is now being used for a more appropriate
job in long-term storage.
This has resulted in a roadmap of future
projects. As next step a concept is in place
for a full Unified Communications roll-out,
scheduled for 2013, including presence and
video. The business is now more secure, more
flexible and better able to respond quickly.
Proactive monitoring of systems means there
is less downtime, server problems can be
repaired in hours rather than the 2-3 days of
manual work required previously. Updates
and software patches are quicker to roll out.
“In the past this was a big deal. No more,” says
Daniel Schrom, head of Corporate IT Systems.
ALPLA’s CIO Klaus P. Metzler’s summary
after project completion: “There is greater
availability of systems, within the production
and supply chain, and it is much easier and
faster to implement new services. It has
matched the IT function with the needs
of the ALPLA organization.”
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hpe.com/go/services
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Rate this document
One source, simpler to coordinate
Berchtold says HPE helped to define a
method and structure to plan and implement
the whole transformation program which
could have been an overwhelmingly complex
process without structuring the tasks in the
right way. Having a single point of contact at
HPE and clearly defined responsibilities
makes it easier to co-ordinate all sub-projects
and tasks. “It saves us time and grief – with
multiple partners, planning meetings can
descend into finger pointing. With HPE, we
have everything we needed in one source.”
© Copyright 2012-2013, 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.
4AA4-3039ENW, November 2015, Rev. 3
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