Case Studies
20 March, 2024
How TeraSky helped Opal Future Technologies Ltd. strategically simplify operations with VMware and Dell Technologies’ VxRail
Opal Future Technologies LTD (Opal Tech) serves the pension fund market with a complex, national-scale, uniform information system that improves members’ data, consolidates work processes, and reduces operating costs. But in keeping up with their growing clientele, Opal Tech’s team faced a few administrative challenges. Their system, provided by various vendors, was pieced together from disparate products and services. Every upgrade kicked off a long and often confusing process of clarifications and confirmations between each of the different components, and the team needed near-expert levels of understanding of networking, storage, and more, to adequately manage the environment.
Determined to simplify their management and upgrade processes, Opal Tech turned to TeraSky. By their description, their list of requirements was both long and stringent; among them:
- A unified infrastructure based on a communication network and a single hardware manufacturer
- Convenient upgrades
- A single support center for all components of the solution
- Special growth capabilities according to the need for adding individual discs or processing power
- Adaptability according to the needs of the organization
- Customization of uniform hardware and dedicated software versions that are tested prior to distribution to servers to ensure the suitability of components and eliminate malfunctions.
In addition, Opal Tech was eager to reduce the time and energy they were spending on educating their team on specializations for the additional components that are part of a holistic solution. This includes storage, SAN and network switches, and replications. Opal Tech preferred that the chosen product be prevalent in the market and expected the highest level of performance.
Given these requirements, Dell Technologies, in collaboration with TeraSky, designed the VxRail appliance, streamlining the hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) system. Now, VxRail can support Opal Tech’s VMware software, significantly increasing the company’s performance.
HCI systems improve efficiency, increase scalability, and lower costs by offering consistent operations using native integration, familiar management tools, integrated lifecycle management, and APIs for extensibility. Further, VxRail is jointly engineered with VMware, optimized for VMware vSAN, and designed to enable deep integration across the VMware ecosystem. This partnership approach enabled Opal to leverage their existing knowledge of and familiarity with the VMware environment within the new solution, making the transition truly seamless.
“Working with TeraSky to customize the solution to Opal Tech’s specific needs demonstrated the true power and flexibility of VxRail. We are delighted to provide the service and infrastructure that meet their high standards,” expressed Dell Account Executive Raanan Shafir.
“This particular case encapsulates the power of VMware-backed solutions and how they can scale with our customers as they grow,” said Niv Raz, VMware Israel CTO. “It also captures the excellence of great partners like Dell and TeraSky, who continue to expand the boundaries of what’s possible with VMware’s versatile technology.”
The solution, indeed, addressed every one of Opal Tech’s concerns. “We already had deep experience with and trust in VMware solutions, so when TeraSky handed over the keys following the setup, it was effortless to get down to work – we simply moved from familiar technology to new technology that still felt familiar,” said Avi Azerrad, Opal Tech’s Head of Technology Infrastructure. “Moreover, receiving all of the services through Dell Technologies made a world of difference for our administrative management since they handle all integration issues on their backend. In fact, we no longer need to make any special preparations or technological inquiries for required upgrades or software patches to a third party.”
Recently, Opal Tech moved the computer systems to a new data center and used TeraSky’s professional services to manage the migration process to the new site. Since the infrastructure was uniform and independent of external components, the transition was smooth; an orderly shutdown was conducted the night before the transition, and immediately the next morning, all the systems went up successfully. TeraSky’s VP Solution Architect, Lir Shif shared, “The outcome was ideal. We showed up early in the morning to pick up the servers, and by the next day, everything was set up and working, with zero errors or user-side disruptions. We were proud to be able to accomplish that for Opal Tech.”