Creating Mexico’s Largest Private Cloud at Walmart de Mexico

I started working with Walmart de Mexico on a short-term contract. It was supposed to be an in-and-out project, and I expected to leave in about a month.

Fourteen years later, I’m still here, proudly serving as the Senior Manager and working on our global technology. I manage an in-house team of 16 people who handle compute, network, and storage. We operate in the background and make things simple, prioritizing availability for all departments and end clients. The Walmart mantra is “save money, live better.” On the tech side of the house, this means we focus on bringing value to everything we do.

I’ve had an amazing career with Walmart de Mexico, and I’ve seen many changes that have impacted our approach to new technology. Solutions must be robust enough to handle all our needs across all our stores. They also have to be financially viable so we can continue offering the best prices to customers.

We’re extraordinarily picky about our technology partners, and when we launched a project to build a new private cloud, we had to find the best of the best.

Our private cloud project provided the spark we needed

We initially thought building a private cloud would be fairly routine: put in new hardware, enable this, migrate that, and off we’d go. But we quickly saw the private cloud project as an opportunity to undergo a more extensive upgrade that would ultimately allow us to boost our capabilities for innovation.

With our previous setup, we didn’t have any optimization, on-demand services, automation, or virtualization, and few integrations. Everything worked, but we felt we could do so much better.

At the same time, we lacked the spark we needed to get started. Other projects always took priority, or we lacked the proper buy-in. But as we explored the idea of building a new private cloud, we knew we were finally in the right place to enhance our environment.

We started an RFP process to replace the infrastructure at our old headquarters. We spoke with dozens of technology companies across the country to see if they could bring our dreams to life. Part of the evaluation involved asking each provider three questions:

• Will the new technology support our current way of working?
• How much will the solution cost?
• What will the solution look like to install?

After two months of searching for best-in-class providers, we identified a clear winner: Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

We decided to work with HPE for a number of reasons:

1. They offered cutting-edge technology that could bring the puzzle pieces of our technology solutions together.
2. All the other hyperconverged solutions we evaluated lagged behind HPE technology.
3. I wanted a private cloud that could operate in a legacy environment and support future use cases. HPE solutions would work well in our existing environment and position us for whatever came next.

HPE was exactly what we needed so we were ready to do something spectacular.

A collaborative implementation puts everyone at ease

There were some nerves at the beginning. It was a daunting project and one of the first of its kind for a private company in Mexico. We needed to ensure we were doing all the right things and avoiding potential disruptions.

Together with the HPE team, we created a great model for Walmart while respecting our bottom line and budget parameters. Through this project, we realized that HPE would help us do more than adapt and innovate. They were going to enable us to reinvent ourselves from the ground up.

The implementation process was very collaborative, with technical professionals calling in from India and across the Americas. There was a clear chain of communication, so if we ever had a question, HPE was there to answer it.

Soon, all of our fears and doubts vanished. We'd made the right choice. Our private cloud was exactly as we’d envisioned it.

A well-connected, AI-enhanced environment

Today, most of our workloads run on HPE SimpliVity and HPE ProLiant servers (with about 14 management nodes and more than 70 production nodes). Everything is easy to manage through a powerful console that has a colorful panel and many customization options. All of this is under the HPE GreenLake umbrella.

We have strong secure remote control access to every HPE ProLiant server through Integrated Lights-Out (iLO). These servers are connected to the IRS and the iLO Amplifier, which help us monitor our environment. All of our private cloud nodes are connected to HPE InfoSight. This cloud-based platform provides usage metrics and health indicators, relying on AI to predict demand, prevent problems, and make intelligent recommendations to best manage and support our infrastructure. We also secured additional support through HPE Complete Care Service, an operational service that provides personalized assistance through an assigned support team.

Around 70% to 80% of our core base services run on our private cloud through HPE compute. We’re also working on a strategy to incorporate our old storage platform to new solutions, such as HPE Alletra, as we continue our digital evolution.

Expanding services on the largest private cloud in Mexico

HPE helped the Walmart team develop the best technology solution for our needs and our financial considerations. We received the right hardware, the right compute, and the right team, and the right partner brought everything together. If we had chosen another supplier, I’m not sure we would’ve had the same positive outcome.

This project had a lot of visibility throughout HPE and Walmart Mexico, including our CIO and CTO, and it’s far from over. Our environment continues to evolve as we strive to meet the needs of our teams. For example, we plan to replicate this data center in another city in Mexico to split services and create a disaster recovery strategy. We’re determining whether we can provide other services, such as Kubernetes, a VDIPOD, and a namespace for our users. We are also increasing automation and self-service capabilities to decrease our time to market from weeks to days, or even hours.

This private cloud is the first in Walmart and the biggest one in Mexico, and I’m proud to say I had a hand in building it. We know what we are capable of, and HPE gave us everything we needed to remove the barriers to innovation.