Nordlo delivers end-to-end solution to SIGI Europe
Customers
Gekås Ullared
chose Nordlo as its
IT partner and
advisor
The challenge
Gekås Ullared is a growing attraction that since the 1960s has flourished into a full-scale tourist destination with stores, restaurants and its own holiday village. Over time, the need for constantly available operations became increasingly critical as the old server park in the company’s own data centre needed replacing.
“We’re extremely impressed that the product performs so well. It’s an awesome lift for us performance wise; the entire environment is faster.”
The solution
When it was time to renew the servers and SAN in their own data centre, they got in touch with several different suppliers of which Nordlo Borås was one, to compare different solutions and find one that suited their operation best. The IT environment itself was complex and demanded the right expertise to produce the best solution. There was also a need to build more reliability into the data centre to get rid of the single point of failure, i.e. that a single part of the system could cause the entire operation to fail. “Gekås is Sweden’s biggest tourist destination. When the store is full, all of the technology from the checkout line to the stock room must function – we’re talking about downtime of no more than one minute. So the operational reliability standards are extremely high,” says Johan Armfelt, IT manager at Gekås.
Following a long-term comparison with different alternatives and suppliers, Nordlo Borås’ solution proved to be the best.
“We looked at many solutions, and two years ago we thought we’d found the right one,” says Magnus Eliasson, who works in Gekås IT department. “But this was not the case, and during the past six months we’ve evaluated and compared various solutions. This was when we found Nordlo’s solution to be the best for our operation. In competition with other suppliers, Nordlo delivered a storage solution as well as multiple servers to meet our data centre requirements.”
“It was truly satisfying to have Gekås choose us after such a long comparative process in exposure to competition,” says Christian Fast at Nordlo. “It shows the level of expertise we’re able to offer our customers.”
Close contact and collaboration with the supplier were important for Gekås’ IT department. “We enjoy excellent collaboration with Nordlo Borås, and above all with the right people. We like to have as few partners as possible in order to maintain good, close relationships. We can rely on Nordlo as a supplier, for backup, specialist expertise and as a sounding board,” continues Johan.
“Nordlo provides both backup and support should anything happen in our IT department. They know our operating environment and are able to provide expertise when we need to complement our own IT department. Martin Westberg at Nordlo is a skilled technical specialist who complements our staff. Under an agreement with us, Nordlo makes regular visits to keep updated about our operating environment while also providing new insights and discussing future changes. Because Martin is also a consultant for other customers, he knows about other types of solutions and problems that may occur. Together, we’re able to work proactively with IT.”
Customer benefit
The data centre upgrade was successful. “We experienced a few minor problems along the way, but none because of Nordlo. We’re extremely impressed that the product performs so well. It’s an awesome lift for us performance wise; the entire environment is faster. The equipment boots up quicker and the daily admin for our IT department will be faster and much simpler, while operational reliability is much higher.
The server environment is now operating in test mode, and we will soon begin migrating by transferring data step-by-step. It will take a great deal of work before we can make full use of it, but it will be great to empty all the data from the old equipment and pension it off. We know that it will perform according to our test; this solution quite simply provided us with the most technology for our money,” says Johan. Read more about Gekås Ullared at gekas.com.