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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. Since its launch in 2004, Missing Piece has offered its customers virtual desktops, application hosting, networking, and many other services in more than 300 locations across the Netherlands. The company is known for delivering the most up-to-date technology solutions with optimum performance, and a keen eye on cost control.

Missing Piece’s small technical team is responsible for managing all customer requests, keeping infrastructure and software up-to-date, delivering new and expanded services, and scaling to accommodate growth. At any given time, Missing Piece can have 150 different customers with applications running on different application servers – including CRM systems designed for the financial services industry in the Netherlands. All of which compete on the same platform for storage and CPU cycles.

With the company expanding at 40% annually, in order to maintain such a high level of success, Missing Piece needs solutions that are simple and standardized, while also being scalable and easy to automate.

Making the Move to HyperFlex

Last year, Missing Piece opted to move over to Cisco HyperFlex hyperconverged. As a UCS customer for more than nine years, Missing Piece spokesman Wouter Hindriks, the company’s team lead for network & security, shared one of the key features that drew the company to HyperFlex. “As a rapidly growing company, we’re adding 40% growth year-over-year, so we really like HyperFlex’s ability to scale quickly.”

“Cisco UCS templates make it very simple to configure new servers. However, we ended up with separate silos of storage in our SAN environment, making storage management challenging and time consuming,” Hindriks continued. “When Cisco HyperFlex came out, we asked the question, ‘does this make storage as flexible and scalable as Cisco UCS does for computing?’ The answer is yes.

Our recent upgrade took 68 seconds to increase our storage by 192TB. Switching to Cisco Hyperflex boosted performance by 40-90% for our customers.”

Cisco’s HyperFlex unifies the management of compute, while also simplifying installation and ongoing management for the Missing Piece team. “Once you tell Cisco Hyperflex what you want, it does all the work for you by using a guided installation. That means I don’t have to log in to every node or manually re-configure the network. When I open vSphere afterward, everything is there and correct,” explained Hindriks. “The same goes for VMware ESXi, Cisco HyperFlex operating software, and Cisco UCS firmware updates. The system verifies the versions are correct and does the update without disruption. It’s been great for our peace of mind.”

What’s the future for Missing Piece’s data center? With its successful installation of HyperFlex last year, the company is looking to almost double that capacity in 2020 – moving everything over to HyperFlex.

Want to learn more about how Missing Piece is using HyperFlex? Check out this case study.

The post Missing Piece Chooses HyperFlex for Scalability appeared first on Cisco Blogs.

Original Source: blogs.cisco.com

Elon Musk Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images

Elon Musk has some business advice for other companies: “Maximize the area under the curve of customer happiness.”
The Tesla CEO said that is the goal of his company, and other businesses should aim to do the same thing.
The hill-shaped curve shows that with more options, like Tesla’s option to “subscribe” to its self-driving capabilities, customers have more ways to be satisfied.
Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

Tesla’s goal is to “maximize the area under the curve of customer happiness,” CEO Elon Musk said in an earnings call on Wednesday.

He advised that it’s “the kind of thing that all companies should try to do.” See the rest of the story at Business Insider