Powerful Relationships – Powerful Results

Lenovo servers, storage, & PCs

April 13, 2023

Cloud & Data Platform
Lenovo
Microsoft
IBM
Veeam
Case story

Walking hand-in-hand and having each other’s back is the be-all and end-all when forming a great relationship between two parties in business. This is the crux of the relationship between Lenovo, us, and our excellent common customer, Infomedia. On top of that, the collaboration has created such great results that words are barely needed. The statement is simply ”we are big fans”.

“We go back a ways” Claus Lindquist Henriksen, Head of Nordic IT Operations at Infomedia says when asked about his long-term relationship with his contact person, Allan Sandager Laursen. “We have been doing business with Allan for many years and there is much more to this than just the customer-sales representative relationship. In the beginning, we primarily purchased Lenovo laptops from edgemo (now Danoffice IT), but as time went on, we added several other types of products.” However, Claus points out that the valuable aspect of the collaboration is about something other than products, there is an extra layer. “Feedback and counseling are ever present and that adds that little something extra. It is never ‘just a sale’ because he makes sure it is the right solution for us in the end.”

Licence to operate

The transition from product sales to adding consulting to our solutions is an aspect Claus is happy to talk about: "At one point, we needed to transfer all of our Microsoft licenses and at that time, we only purchased hardware and devices from Allan. However, at one point in time, I mentioned it to him and he immediately jumped on it and introduced me to edgemo consultants in this field. Once again, they were far superior in their guidance than the other parties we were speaking with,” Claus explains and adds: “We were put in the trusted hands of Jimmy Wolfhagen who was efficient in creating a solution which even saved us money.”

Money Is Not Everything

Modern IT operations is about resources at several levels. Obviously, there is a financial level. As far as performance goes, the finger is pointed at the human resources within the company: what skills do we have internally, and which skills do we need to purchase? This is a new, yet classic, dilemma for many when it comes to IT operations, and this was also the case for Infomedia.

“For a while, we had been using Infrastructure as a Service, but when it was all said and done, we were not completely satisfied with the outcome. Did it truly make sense to outsource it or was it time to take it back? This particular question became very relevant when we needed to update our servers,” Claus says and adds: “We contacted several suppliers and asked for their input all the way around from PC’s and storage to networks including backup and all licenses. Once again, we confirmed how valuable proper understanding and guidance are. In this instance, edgemo came through with a better solution than everybody else. The proposal for this particular project was not necessarily cheaper, but they had a completely different understanding of what we actually needed.”

Claus explains that a crucial starting point in creating the solution was to determine which resources he and Infomedia would handle themselves: “Several of our team members had experience in running servers and in this, edgemo was good about bringing us up to speed rather than selling us a bunch of unnecessary solutions. At this juncture, guidance and improvement of qualifications were a part of the solution. This is where I felt the collaboration truly demonstrated its power”.

Enough Chips to Go Around

Through the years from 2020 to 2023, we experienced a global shortage of chips among other things, and this was a cause for great concern everywhere in the IT industry. Unfortunately, this crisis coincided with Infomedia’s project mentioned above. However, all problems have solutions! “We needed to take action right when the shortage of chips was at its peak in 2022. The network aspects were particularly all too uncertain. Our solution was created by IBM for storage and PC’s while the network was from Lenovo. Here, Allan was on it from the get-go! He went in on several occasions and changed the solution and this is where IBM and Lenovo were fairly stable along the way in terms of ability to deliver.”

No Noise or Worries

As we write this, we are approaching the day of the ribbon cutting for our solution. “We have everything running in a test environment right now and we have a lot of confidence in everything being sized just right. This is a new type of SAN and IBM guarantees that there is room because of the compression. We expect to migrate in April of 2023 so it will of course be exciting.”

Claus explains that he remains calm and that is largely due to the faith he has in the collaboration itself. “I have never experienced any large fall-outs working with edgemo and when it comes to Lenovo, all I can say is that we are satisfied. This applies whether we are talking PC’s, monitors, or hardware – we are big fans! Occasionally, when we have tried other manufacturer’s laptops, they were always noisy and in addition to that, Lenovo just has a support function in a league of its own”, they say. “When we say we are calm, this is also because we have used edgemo’s buffer inventory – especially when there was a large chip shortage. With that, we were able to strike when we needed something, whether it was PC’s, docking stations, or anything else. This has saved us from a lot of worry. They have our back in many ways,” Claus Lindquist Henriksen, Head of Nordic IT Operations, Infomedia, concludes.

Facts about the Solution

We started out by completing a thorough analysis which resulted in the following solution:

A design based on Lenovo ThinkSystem SR635 servers for a large VMware-cluster with a single 32cores AMD CPU in each – in order to optimally utilize the VMware Enterprise Plus licensing.
Veeam Backup & Replication distributed in two locations, once again with a Lenovo ThinkSystem SR635 server as well as Lenovo D3284 JBOD storage for backup data, which also included Veeam O365 backup.
VMware- and Veeam licenses were delivered with the Lenovo servers in order to obtain the proper pricing.
IBM storage is already known to Infomedia and therefore, it made sense to include this in an overall datacenter solution with 5 years of service in order for Infomedia to create its own datacenter on premises with complete peace of mind.