Chapter 2
Missing Piece specializes in IT outsourcing and hosted services for small and medium-sized businesses in the Netherlands, with a focus on insurance advisory companies and other financial services firms. Active since 2004, Missing Piece offers its customers a high level of service, delivering up-to-date technology solutions with optimum performance, cost control, and a user-friendly approach.
The company delivers virtual desktops, application hosting, networking, and other services for over 300 customer locations across the Netherlands. A small technical team must take care of all customer requests, keep infrastructure and software up to date, deliver new and expanded services, and scale to accommodate growth. With the company expanding at 40 percent annually, continued success requires solutions that are simple and standardized while also being scalable and easy to automate.
Unifying the management of compute and storage has been a big benefit, and Cisco HyperFlex has also greatly simplified installation and ongoing management for the Missing Piece team.
Refresh legacy infrastructure.
Proof the network.
Support 250-350 users concurrently.
Liberty London is a world-famous luxury department store and a beacon for British design. Founded in 1875 and located in London’s West End, its mock-Tudor building was constructed in 1924 from the timbers of two ships: HMS Impregnable and HMS Hindustan. Today, Liberty London ranks among Retail Week’s top 10 bricks-and-mortar retailers.10 The company has undergone a substantial revamp of its department store and operations. It has created a shopping journey across its multiple floors and historic surroundings, embraced digital retail, and deployed Cisco’s hyperconverged infrastructure to achieve agility and flexibility in what is a fast-paced industry.
HyperFlex will host Liberty London’s main controllers, Firewalls, test and dev environment, CRM, and shipping applications, as well the system the retailer uses to store its intellectual property. Traditional applications including antivirus, HR and finance will also be migrated to HyperFlex, together with Cisco’s PRIME service catalogue and ISE. "Cisco HyperFlex meets our needs now and in the future. We saw that we could scale up and scale out whenever we needed. When I joined Liberty London, the company wanted to have faith in IT again. We’ve made the right investments and we are reaping the rewards right now.” – Haaron Weekes, Head of IT Service Delivery, Liberty London
Learn more about Liberty London and other companies using hyperconverged infrastructure in innovative ways on the Compute Customer Stories webpage.
A French cloud service provider, ForePaaS simplifies data management and analysis by providing platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering. Customers visit a web portal to select their data sources, customize a prebuilt template for their industry, and choose the cloud where they’ll store and process their data.
ForePaaS launched its cloud service in April 2015. Right away, demand kept more than a dozen developers busy. To introduce new analytics applications for more industries, the company needed a more versatile development platform. ForePaaS began with three Cisco HyperFlex nodes providing more than 1.3 TB of memory and nearly 8 TB of storage—all in two rack units. Deployment took just one hour.
