SFS, or the Finnish Standards Association, was looking for a contemporary service and a modern solution to be placed in their own server room as a replacement for their existing service and backup environment whose life cycle was near its end. In Finland, SFS sells, maintains, stores and distributes data concerning standards and technical requirements; it was therefore important to help SFS keep their sensitive data secure. Moreover, SFS had been contemplating on how to do things more efficiently and free up their own IT resources to serving their end customers instead of doing system maintenance.
Long collaboration built on reliability and high service quality
“SFS's relationship with Advania stems back to the days of Vintor, and this is something that connects us. We were already familiar with them, and we had been happy with their service and the innovative way in which their experts operate. They have always come up with out-of-the-box solutions, providing a new perspective to service procurement, as exemplified by this hybrid cloud solution," says Timo Kangas, an IT expert with SFS.
Project kick-off and the delivered solution
The project was started with a system survey, which served as the basis for the call for tender. The call for tender featured specific requirements concerning the amounts of memory, fast connections and compatibility of systems. Basically, SFS wanted to have new and more efficient cloud-friendly systems to replace their existing ones with.
Advania Finland Oy, together with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), implemented a hyperconverged-type platform solution where the infrastructure components are application-based. The equipment was placed in the client's own server room, and Advania is responsible for system maintenance up to the virtual layer. The arrangement frees up a given share of the work input of SFS experts to be allocated to other development. The solution also includes a disaster recovery service, which ensures that SFS's business can continue despite any unforeseen disruptions at the source end. In the service, the data is automatically replicated in real time to Advania's server rooms in Finland. This means that SFS's server room and its services will be available from another location as quickly as in minutes in any fault situation. The recovery point interval can be as short as 15 seconds.
Benefits of the service
According to Timo Kangas, the new system allowed SFS to apply a more modern and cost-efficient solution ‒ based on the pay-per-use principle. "We got a ready-configured environment featuring new technology, more flexibility than before and outsourced maintenance of basic IT functions. And we have additional support available if needed."
Why Advania?
"I'll recommend Advania wholeheartedly. Their offer stood out from the rest in a good way, and it contained a lot of such features that we hadn't even requested ‒ although we had thought of them. Particularly the disaster recovery solution was one that interested us and that had previously been available only to larger corporations," says Kangas.
