Established in Oxford in 1943, Penlon is a leading international medical device manufacturing company with a presence in over 90 countries across Europe, North America, Middle East and Asia. The company manufactures and distributes products and systems for anesthesia, intubation, oxygen therapy and suction.
Penlon had been previously relying on a traditional VMware environment, but over time it was proving too complex and time consuming to manage. The complexity of the system meant that Penlon struggled to migrate data and install updates. Without regular updates the company was left vulnerable to downtime and costly outages, as there was no way to ensure they had the most up to date environment.
Tony Serratore, IT Manager, at Penlon commented, “The systems were vastly difficult to manage and when it came to updates we had to ensure everything was in sync. If the system seemed to be working we would not even think about installing upgrades as it was too complex. But this wasn’t a long term solution.”
After evaluating the market and considering a number of other vendors such as Simplivity, Penlon selected Scale’s hyperconverged HC3 cluster to support over 40 virtual machines.
“After registering our interest, we received a POC product within two days. Not only were we impressed with the technology but we felt Scale Computing would value us as a customer if we made that investment.” said Serratore.
Rather than treat storage, servers, virtualisation, and management as different datacentre silos, HC3 products bring these all together in a comprehensive system and automates overall management. This allows IT to focus on managing applications, not infrastructure.
With no virtualisation software to license and no external storage to buy, HC3 products lower out-of-pocket costs and radically simplify the infrastructure needed to keep applications running. HC3 products make the deployment and management of a highly available and scalable infrastructure as easy to manage as a single server.
After implementing Scale, Penlon has reduced its management time by hours. In addition, RPO and RTO dramatically reduced from three days to a matter of minutes.
“As an international company Penlon is constantly looking to expand its business. However, planning budgets for IT infrastructure ahead can be difficult,” said Serratore. “With Scale we have effectively been able to build a data centre in a server room, without cloud. The technology provides servers, storage and virtualisation in one solution with complete transparency.”
