Car dealer closes its data centers and "moves" to the cloud HP

Not long ago, for the Russian business, the “cloud” (in the IT sense of the term) was ranked in the same row as the clouds on the satellite of Saturn, Titan. Something very interesting is clearly hidden under the thick veil of marketing noise, but it is completely incomprehensible how to touch and examine it.

But now it is safe to say that everything has changed. At least, now any business of medium and large scale can already estimate by example the full benefits of the cloud implementation.

On May 19, HP, together with its partners (including Kommersant Publishing House), held in Moscow the presentation of the first live cloud project on the domestic market - migration to the cloud of almost the entire IT infrastructure of the ROLF Group of Companies, Russia's largest importer and seller cars of foreign brands.

As part of the project, tasks that were performed on 250 servers in two ROLF data centers will be provided to the company as services. This includes all the main business applications: ERP-system "1C: Enterprise 8", intranet portals, corporate email, CRM-system Microsoft Dynamics, as well as specialized applications that serve sales offices and service centers. By the end of 2011, all physical servers will be decommissioned.
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A number of tasks, mainly for developing and testing new solutions, will consume cloud resources using the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model. Production applications will mainly be based on the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) with a guaranteed high level of service, which is specified in the contract with HP. Some applications, such as e-mail, will be used by ROLF as a service using the SaaS model.

According to ROLF estimates, by transferring corporate applications to HP data centers, over the next five years, the group of companies will be able to save more than 50 million rubles on only one IT infrastructure - servers, software licensing and data center support personnel. One of the components of this savings is a multiple reduction in the cost of updating the server fleet.

After the project is completed, the customer will be able to flexibly manage the used IT infrastructure, connect additional resources of servers and storage systems as the business develops and reduce the risks of losses associated with interruptions in IT. For example, the opening of new ROLF offices, dealerships and service stations will occur quickly and with minimal equipment costs (there will be no need to purchase additional servers for the branches and waste time on their installation and commissioning). And the sooner a branch is opened and the service is better provided, the higher the margins of the whole company.

In addition, after the completion of the project, ROLF will vacate the premises in which its data centers used to be located.

To the question “why didn’t you choose a domestic supplier of similar services,” the representative of ROLF complained about the insufficient level of quality of service provided by Russian companies.

According to the general director of HP in Russia, Alexander Mikoyan, the “deal with the ROLF group of companies is the first major project of its kind on the Russian market. Up to this point, not a single large company in Russia has transferred all of its IT to the cloud infrastructure of a third-party provider, so for HP this is a landmark transaction both in scale and in importance for the market as a whole. ”

According to experts, the project with ROLF doubled the size of the cloud services market in Russia at one stroke. And you can be sure that such a jerk will be followed by a change in the consciousness of the business. And behind it already - new interesting projects. But for now let's talk about this - we can still tell a lot.