Retain a Competitive Edge with Hardware That Scales for Even the Most Intensive Workloads

In a competitive market, becoming a technology leader can be what makes your entire organization stand out. Grupo Energiko is on that path.

Founded in 1940 with the opening of the Alameda Hotel, Grupo Energiko is a business group of more than 30 leading companies providing solutions in the energy, commercial, and services sectors in Mexico and internationally. As IT Manager, I am the lead responsible for server and storage infrastructure across the entire group. 

My team of 28 provides IT support and services to companies spanning various verticals, from energy equipment to convenience stores, hotel operation to real estate. Highly available and reliable IT infrastructure is required to provide a high level of support and flexibility, and to improve service levels for our growing number of customers.

Lack of Standardization Was Getting in Our Way, but Our Partner Had a Solution

Something was holding my team back from providing Grupo Energiko companies with the most competitive technological resources. Our servers weren’t standardized and lacked centralization, which put greater demand on my team’s bandwidth to cope with administration. This directly impacted customers and resulted in order delays. Non-compliance with SLAs in turn created a stressful work environment for my team. In short, we were merely reacting.

We needed to get to a stage where we could be proactive. My team looks for solutions that are reliable and have a long enough lifespan to plan our technological cycles in an efficient and organized way. The ultimate goal for our IT department is solutions that are nimble and flexible, but they also have to help us achieve a steady plan for the future, both technologically and financially. We took our requirements to IT partner, Computadoras Electrón.

Computadoras Electrón has developed into a key IT product and service provider in Guadalajara, the Mexican Silicon Valley. We’ve partnered with them for over five years, and they know our overarching technical and operational needs. When we approached them about this project and explained the target, reach, and our requirements, they suggested a beta trial of HPE ProLiant DL325 Gen10 Plus V2.

We liked the quality of the HPE ProLiant product, its guarantee, and its ease of integrating HPE ProLiant into a diverse ecosystem like ours. The cost was competitive with other suppliers on the market. What really set it apart from other solutions for us, however, was the level of support we would receive. HPE closely monitors their products, which gave us the confidence that we would never feel alone if we acquired this solution.

We were surprised by the suggestion of a beta trial—that hadn’t been part of our original thinking for the project, though on analysis, it had its benefits. We could get to know the product, and strengthen ties with HPE, before purchasing it. Computadoras Electrón would also bring their expertise—including their knowledge from other client installations—to our trial. 

Specifically, Hector Rendon, Manager of Infrastructure and Technology, and Guillermo Velasco, General Manager, produced a solution design to test HPE ProLiant within one of the group’s companies. This trial could easily fit within our project plans, and would give us a sense of how the solution would perform in the complete environment. We learned from the trial that HPE ProLiant had the flexibility we were looking for that would allow us to take the creative and proactive stance we wanted.

An Investment That Pays Off for Staff and Customers—and Is Built To Last

With HPE ProLiant, we’ve found a scalable solution. We needed something that could adjust to our demands for the next four to five years, including unforeseen compliance requirements. We experienced a fourfold increase in transactional operations, order processing, and storage demand when the government enacted new legislation around invoicing, for example. HPE ProLiant can not only support these workload increases, but our beta testing has also shown us that pushing new operational boundaries will not crash this system. We can rest assured that the solution will be operational throughout its intended lifespan, ensuring our ROI. 

Installing HPE ProLiant means that my IT team spends less time firefighting, leaving more time to focus on improving company operations. The certainty of having technology aligned with our business strategies has created a culture of technological renewal. We have moved toward a standardized, centralized compute platform and data center that provides a high level of service for our customers.

The best thing about HPE ProLiant is its flexibility. It means that we can provision resources and have plans in place for all kinds of scenarios. When the pandemic hit, we adapted to staff working from home without disruption. Staff had the same experience from home as at the office. We wouldn’t have been able to keep up operations without the use of HPE technology.

Our beta trial convinced us that the density of processor cores and the memory of the HPE ProLiant equipment made it an excellent choice for Energiko. This is the foundation for our virtualized environment, and it allows us to run intensive workloads and more virtual servers on the same compute. In turn, we have retained and expanded our client portfolio, all the while increasing availability and reducing service times for orders. The integration of new security mechanisms with HPE ProLiant also reduces organizational risk.

HPE and Computadoras Electrón accompanied us throughout the process, from design to implementation. Knowing that we had their support gave us confidence and peace of mind during the whole project.

How you optimize your resources is key. We know that the operations Grupo Energiko companies handle are growing exponentially. With HPE ProLiant, we now have cutting-edge technology that can handle those future requirements and will help our companies stand out in competitive markets.