Less time and hassle for IT operations, more resources for digital innovations: RheinEnergie AG relies on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud to provide solutions for the energy world of tomorrow.
INDUSTRY
Retail
CHALLENGES
RheinEnergie is an energy service provider based in Cologne and the Rhineland region, and active throughout Germany with around 3,000 employees. Together with its holdings and cooperation partners, RheinEnergie is responsible for a service area covering approximately 2.5 million people in private households, commerce, craft, and industry. The company also offers a wide range of energy services and contracting solutions.
Sustainability is a key priority for RheinEnergie. The energy service provider consistently invests in the development of renewable energies, and operates more than 100 wind power, photovoltaic, and biogas plants. At the same time, the Cologne-based company is committed to developing its home city into a smart city. For example, RheinEnergie has built one of the most substantial charging infrastructures for e-vehicles in Germany. RheinEnergie is testing new technologies for the energy transition, such as intelligent traffic management and energy-saving street lighting, on a specially designated "climate street" in the Nippes district.
"For these and other issues in the future, we need more digital expertise than ever," says Lars Baumgarten, Manager IT - Technical Management at RheinEnergie. "Our IT organization is facing particular challenges in this area. Our specialists, however, can only provide support if they are not spending the majority of their time managing servers, storage systems, and other IT components."
When RheinEnergie renewed its existing IT infrastructure, it was focused primarily on two issues: reducing complexity, and increasing the degree of automation in order to reduce the workload of IT specialists.
SOLUTION
Following a Europe-wide tender, RheinEnergie decided to run its central IT applications on a hyperconverged infrastructure from Nutanix. The IT service provider Bechtle was commissioned to set up and manage the internal "RheinEnergie Cloud." "The new solution architecture met exactly our requirements," explains Lars Baumgarten. "Nutanix provides us with a turnkey and highly scalable infrastructure platform, in which all components are seamlessly integrated. Today, we see our IT as a pool of resources that we can use and expand quite flexibly."
RheinEnergie's IT department rarely has to worry about the underlying technologies. As a managed service provider, Bechtle looks after all system layers up to and including the hypervisor, and reliably provides the utility company with the required performance for the virtualized IT systems.
The new IT infrastructure at RheinEnergie consists of two Nutanix clusters: one for the database solutions, and one for the rest of the virtualized infrastructure. The two clusters are distributed across a total of three server rooms in different fire compartments. A special feature of the solution architecture is the rack awareness supported by Nutanix. The data from each virtual machine is synchronously replicated to a node at one of the other two sites.
"This approach provides us with an extremely high level of resilience," explains Alexander Schmidt, Service Engineer at RheinEnergie. "Even if an entire physical rack or site were to fail, no data is lost and the cluster remains available. All users can continue their work immediately. This gives us the level of uptime we need as operators of critical systems and important applications,such as energy trading or network balancing."
Even during the migration of the existing systems to the new infrastructure, there were no interruptions to business operations. All 1,500 virtual machines were moved to the new platform in just two weeks. The virtual machines continue to run on the VMware ESXi hypervisor in the Nutanix environment for the time being. "However, a transfer to Nutanix AHV is also an option in the future," says Lars Baumgarten. "One of our sister companies already had positive experiences with Nutanix's hypervisor."
We want to use our digital expertise in a targeted manner to drive the energy transition with innovative solutions. Therefore, the change to Nutanix was absolutely right for us. The new infrastructure is freeing us up, and allows for a much stronger focus on future topics, such as IoT and SmartEnergy.
Lars Baumgarten, Manager IT - Technical Management, RheinEnergie AG
RESULTS
Faster performance and reliable uptime
RheinEnergie's Nutanix infrastructure is based entirely on SSD technology, providing improved system performance for many applications. "Some application owners immediately confirmed that the response times of their services have been significantly reduced," reports Alexander Schmidt. The IT organization has experienced no downtime or disruptions at all since the migration. This is due to the Nutanix Prism management and monitoring platform. Prism analyzes in real time the behavior of virtual machines, automatically detects anomalies, and can independently trigger the necessary mitigating measures.
IT organization gains time for strategic digitalization projects
The high degree of automation of the Nutanix platform and Bechtle's professional support freed RheinEnergie's IT specialists from almost all operational activities in regard to running the infrastructure. "The times that our system specialists had to manually update 40 to 50 servers every day are over," says Lars Baumgarten. "Instead, we can leverage our expertise where it directly contributes to adding value - for example, in the digitalization of processes using IoT technology."
Higher efficiency and better transparency of costs
RheinEnergie always keeps an eye on the costs of its private cloud infrastructure. Nutanix Xi Beam allows the utility company a complete view in terms of costs for hardware, software, power, cooling, and infrastructure management at any time. These costs can be broken down to individual VMs or applications, and can be allocated to the relevant cost centers via chargeback policies. "With the solution, we always have proof that we are running our infrastructure for significantly less than before - and it's also more cost-effective than a public cloud provider," adds Alexander Schmidt.
OUTLOOK
Disaster recovery in the cloud
For the future IT strategy of RheinEnergie, however, public cloud solutions also play an important role. The energy service provider is considering, among other things, the implementation of a cloud-based disaster recovery concept with Nutanix. Nutanix's Xi Leap service enables all key VMs to be automatically replicated to a cloud environment. The entire process is controlled via the familiar Nutanix Prism management interface. In an emergency, the resources could be restored in the shortest possible time, and without RheinEnergie having to maintain a permanent IT infrastructure.
Self-service provisioning with Calm and ServiceNow
RheinEnergie also wants to further simplify and automate the provision and management of applications. By combining Nutanix Calm with the ServiceNow platform, blueprints of common applications could be published as service catalog items in the future. For example, this would enable users to independently request a virtual machine with a specific service via the internal ordering system. "This way, the time-to-value for the provision of new services could be significantly reduced - another important step towards a more agile IT," says Lars Baumgarten.
Higher efficiency and better transparency of costs
RheinEnergie always keeps an eye on the costs of its private cloud infrastructure. Nutanix Xi Beam allows the utility company a complete view in terms of costs for hardware, software, power, cooling, and infrastructure management at any time. These costs can be broken down to individual VMs or applications, and can be allocated to the relevant cost centers via chargeback policies. "With the solution, we always have proof that we are running our infrastructure for significantly less than before - and it's also more cost-effective than a public cloud provider," adds Alexander Schmidt.