An Infrastructure Overhaul Ensures Business Continuity and Reduces Troubleshooting Time by 50%

Optimizing legacy infrastructure might be a good idea on paper, but in reality, aging infrastructure becomes a barrier to progress and agility. IT teams spend all their time troubleshooting issues and eliminating bottlenecks instead of delivering high-quality services to users.

That’s where we were in 2023. We are Isam Khairi Kabbani Group (IKK Group), a group of more than 40 companies in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We are building the future with our diverse group, which includes trading, manufacturing, and specialized contracting. We make metal, plastics, fabrics, and glass for the construction industry, as well as food products from the Arabian Peninsula, Europe, and India. With 18,000 employees, we operate in the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) countries, North Africa, and Europe.

Getting by with the bare minimum

The goal of the IT infrastructure and cybersecurity team at IKK Group of Companies is to ensure continuity of IT service for almost 4,800 users from our primary data center. We'd been operating efficiently with our previous infrastructure, but as it neared end of life, we began to encounter some unforeseen challenges.

Our capacity and resources couldn’t handle the burden of generating the growing volume of consolidated annual and monthly financial and operational reports for corporate-wide entities. The group runs a hybrid setup of Microsoft Dynamics AX and Dynamics 365 ERP system as a primary business application. These services run on an SQL database on the backend, with reporting servers that required a long time to generate heavy reports due to the size and complexity of the companies' consolidated data. These heavy reports required overnight processing time and sometimes crashed, necessitating a restart of the entire process and wasting business time. This not only strained our IT resources, but also frustrated the sales and marketing teams.

Additionally, there was increased demand for remote connectivity and cloud applications generated by the shift to remote work. Our infrastructure could operate, but only at full resource and capacity utilization. We got everyone online, but couldn’t deliver a seamless remote work experience with the needed performance and storage capacity to ensure maximum productivity and business continuity.

Incremental upgrades weren’t enough

IKK Group had previously overhauled the data center infrastructure in 2010. We went from a multi-vendor setup using Dell, IBM, and others to a sole-sourced environment using HPE blade servers and HPE MSA Storage running on iSCSI disks. In the mid-2010s, we upgraded to HPE EVA Storage, and later, to HPE 3PAR Storage.

An incremental upgrade strategy works—until it doesn’t. With the growing number of application users as the group's companies expanded, users started to complain about the system occasionally being slow, and the team couldn’t guarantee system performance at peak times. We couldn’t address these issues by partially upgrading our infrastructure bit by bit. Our aging systems could no longer scale or cope with our business growth, making it impossible to offer additional services or provide sufficient compute and storage resources to the growing number of internal users.

If we didn’t upgrade our equipment soon, our systems’ decreasing performance would begin to affect our business operations and users' productivity. The optimal solution moving forward was to renovate the entire production environment at once.

A compelling value proposition

The first targets were to increase resources in terms of capacity and computing power and to build systems capable of coping with fluctuating demand. We didn't want to end up with a fully utilized system under a minimum load, nor did we want to be unable to meet a high demand when needed. A large-scale full tech upgrade would free up space for more initiatives and give our team the capacity to provide more services for our users and businesses.

However, we faced some challenges, starting with budget constraints versus the increasing cost of new technologies and systems, and meeting the corporate management criteria and direction for seeking a solution of high value and reliability.

Although we’ve been an HPE customer or business partner for more than a decade, we still explored other vendors' technologies for technical and services comparisons. Ultimately, most of the findings the team received or tested couldn’t match HPE’s offerings and performance. The next step was to evaluate and deeply investigate how a more complete overhaul would improve business continuity, service performance, and stability. Our team worked closely with our HPE rep to determine the optimal solutions and features to eliminate performance bottlenecks and service disruptions while providing more resources for new business services and applications.

The key was validating the long-term value of the investment. Providing more power to the group's centralized IT department team and our manufacturing, design, trading, and marketing companies would allow us all to do more in less time. We expected the increased productivity would eventually lead to business development and growth, which would result in an increase in IKK Group's revenue.

Faced with all this information and after the intensive cooperative efforts and meetings with the HPE team, it was time to make a decision. The corporate management, led and sponsored by the IKK Group Chairman Mr. Hasan Alkabbani, and with the direct approval of the group's CEO Mr. Amr Alkabbani and under the supervision of the group's CIO Mr. Zohdi El Saadi, granted the green light for an upgrade that could keep up with the pace of IKK Group's business.

A transformative shift for IT

To replace our aging bare metal HPE blade servers at our primary data center, we chose HPE Synergy blade servers that deliver composable infrastructure to software-defined data centers. We switched out our HPE 3PAR arrays for HPE Alletra Storage 9000, which provides edge-to-core functionality, leveraging on-prem and cloud resources to deliver 100% data availability along with low latency and faster, more scalable performance.

This new infrastructure provided an immediate company-wide performance boost and proved transformative for the IT Infrastructure team. The team started using HPE InfoSight to track and manage system issues remotely. We now have a comprehensive history of our hardware and software incidents, so if an issue recurs, we can refer back to logs and apply a proven solution instead of troubleshooting from scratch.

The IT Infrastructure team spends nearly 50% less time troubleshooting infrastructure issues after the upgrade. We no longer work frantically to solve problems. Instead, the team is working on long-term projects and initiatives to improve end-user services and propose business tools.

Less maintenance, fewer problems

HPE InfoSight’s AI-powered predictive analytics monitors system inputs and alerts us before a system or equipment failure. In the event of a faulty hardware component, HPE dispatches a technician with a replacement, if needed. We don’t have to be physically available at the data center all the time to ensure business continuity.

The remote capabilities apply to maintenance, too. HPE InfoSight allows us to remotely manage and configure our IT assets from anywhere in the world. At the same time, HPE's support team assists in installing and configuring our hardware, providing 24/7 support.

Our team highly values HPE’s cutting-edge technology and the outstanding support we receive. Professional and efficient support is of great value to a company like ours, with so many different businesses and locations. Although HPE is a longtime IKK Group business partner, the company does not take our business for granted. They continue to offer suggestions and recommendations to get the most value from the offered technologies. The difference now is that our infrastructure technology has the features to support whatever business requirements are needed by the group's companies.

An international vendor who understands our region

HPE understands our needs as a Saudi Arabian company primarily serving GCC countries. The company offers international expertise, a robust regional presence, and industry-leading solutions, making it the best value regardless of price—which, by the way, is fairly competitive.

Our new HPE Synergy servers and HPE Alletra Storage 9000 arrays require less space and power at our primary data center, aligning with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 goal of reducing domestic energy consumption. Reusing our older equipment for staging and testing environments also reduces e-waste, making our infrastructure even more sustainable, which is an added bonus.

HPE technology has given IKK Group of Companies onsite and remote workers robust, always-available infrastructure, and it has given our team peace of mind. Instead of complaining that IT issues are consuming the team’s time and hampering the ability to contribute meaningfully to the business, we have finally put those issues to rest, making room for more creativity and ingenuity.