A few years ago, SSP augmented its on-premises infrastructure with some key cloud-based workloads through Azure, hybridizing its environment. While the company enjoyed the benefits of a hybrid environment, it lacked the ability to move select services and workloads between its on-premises and cloud environments. With reliably stronger performance, SSP’s digital infrastructure is positioned to meet whatever challenges or opportunities the business might face next.
You might not have heard of SSP Group, but across travel locations around the world, there’s a strong chance that SSP has helped you out if you’ve ever found yourself in search of a delicious snack while waiting on a train or flight. SSP is a UK-based global leader in food and beverage services for travelers. The company provides fresh food and beverages from brands like Camden Food Co., Starbucks, M&S, and Burger King to people on the go in railways, airports, and other travel locations across 36 countries, provisioning and delivering more than 550 brands.
But serving that many customers around the world requires serious digital skills. To help ensure that it has the necessary agility and management capabilities to continue satisfying hungry travelers, SSP looked to the cloud to support its on-premises datacenters. It found its solution in Microsoft Azure Stack HCI and Azure Arc.
“Our applications are more performant with Azure Stack HCI. We’ve reduced processing times by 50 percent, and we no longer receive tickets relating to poor performance of our VDI environments.”
Francisco Castillo, Head of Infrastructure, SSP Group
Bridging the gap
The company historically hosted its digital infrastructure on a Hyper-V stack in two UK-based datacenters. A few years ago, SSP augmented its on-premises infrastructure with some key cloud-based workloads through Azure, hybridizing its environment. While the company enjoyed the benefits of a hybrid environment, it lacked the ability to move select services and workloads between its on-premises and cloud environments. To facilitate this, it turned to Azure Stack HCI. “We gained complete interoperability and agility with Azure Stack HCI,” says Francisco Castillo, Head of Infrastructure at SSP Group. “We can run workloads in our datacenters or in the cloud depending on which is the best fit for our business.”
SSP worked with Lenovo and Maple Computing and identified Azure Stack HCI as the right solution for its on-premises infrastructure. “We met with Lenovo and Maple to lay out our requirements and goals,” recalls Ben Bevan, IT Compute and Storage Manager at SSP Group. “Lenovo really listened to us, and with the help of Microsoft and Acuutech, we were able to stand up a test environment to verify the performance of our existing workloads and test drive Azure Stack HCI. It went better than anticipated, and we were really happy.”
Through Lenovo, SSP was able to source the hardware and software it needed for its Azure Stack HCI implementation and benefit from added support and guidance. Lenovo helped with the initial setup by commissioning assets, assisting with the installation and implementation, providing onsite support, and overseeing a smooth handoff. SSP recently finished migrating all workloads to its new Azure Stack HCI environment, and it has fully decommissioned and removed all of its old datacenter equipment.
Visibility meets versatility
SSP’s Azure Stack HCI deployment comprises approximately 500 virtual machines (VMs). Its clusters consist of eight Lenovo ThinkAgile MX nodes with approximately 300 terabytes of storage and 6 terabytes of memory. In terms of workloads, the company runs a Citrix-based Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) that supports users globally, and it hosts most of its applications in its on-premises Azure Stack HCI environment. SSP also runs various web applications on Azure Stack HCI along with supporting services like Azure Active Directory, part of Microsoft Entra, which offers it capabilities like multifactor authentication and single sign-on. Finally, the company is using Azure Arc to enable the central management of its on-premises Azure Stack HCI and Azure cloud environments. Azure Arc is a bridge that extends the Azure platform to help SSP build, secure, and govern applications and services with the flexibility to run across datacenter and edge environments.
Azure Arc is natively installed with new Azure Stack HCI deployments, so SSP can more easily take advantage of other Azure platform capabilities. The company is in the process of setting up and moving all of its monitoring services to Azure Monitor in the coming months. For visibility across its security environment, SSP is using Microsoft Sentinel, and it plans on implementing Azure Firewall to provide highly secure, direct access to users. The company also plans to implement Azure backup and disaster recovery. Additionally, SSP hopes to migrate some of its older on-premises applications to Azure-native services, where it already runs its SAP workloads, to take advantage of the scale, performance, and resilience enhancements of the cloud.
The company is most excited by the centralized management it’s gained with Azure Arc. SSP can monitor everything from one platform, making management far more efficient because the management experience is consistent with how it manages native Azure VMs. Formerly, pinpointing which VM was running on which server or verifying if a VM was offline or a major incident had occurred wasn’t always easy. “With the single pane of glass functionality we get with Azure Arc and Azure Stack HCI, we know exactly where an incident has occurred and can get straight to work resolving it,” states Bevan. That visibility enables more efficient and proactive decision making, and it really helps SSP’s IT team support business needs. “Not having to work across two completely different technology stacks makes it so much easier to deliver new services more efficiently.”
Better returns with reduced effort
SSP is realizing better workload performance with Azure. In all the benchmarking tests conducted on storage and network throughput, the company’s Azure Stack HCI deployment has performed 50 percent better than its previous estate. “When compared with our three-tier infrastructure, our Azure Stack HCI platform provides at least three times more storage bandwidth with less than 1 millisecond latency in every given test scenario,” states Castillo. “Our applications are more performant with Azure Stack HCI. We’ve reduced processing times by 50 percent, and we no longer receive tickets relating to poor performance of our VDI environments.”
Indeed, the opposite is now the case, with employees going out of their way to report enhanced application performance. Says Castillo, “Our migration to Azure Stack HCI was completely hidden from our users, but they’re coming to us now and saying, ‘I don’t know what you did, but our application is running so much faster than before.’”
Additionally, SSP’s migration has directly led to reductions in the company’s carbon footprint. “We crunched the numbers after migrating to Azure Stack HCI and realized that year-on-year, we’ll be saving more than 100,000 kilowatt hours,” says Bevan. Adds Castillo, “We have challenging sustainability goals for the next few years. It’s really difficult for IT to offset all the power we need, so having hardware and architecture that significantly reduces power consumption is really valuable, and we got that with Azure Stack HCI and Lenovo.” SSP was able to reduce its datacenter equipment from almost four racks down to less than one. And as a bonus, lower emissions and reduced kilowatt hours amounts to significant cost savings.
Another tremendous benefit is that the company’s IT teams can work more efficiently and strategically. Having one central management platform means that IT resources can stretch further with less effort and skills required to monitor, manage, and troubleshoot incidents. Since adopting Azure Stack HCI, the number of major incidents at SSP has dropped significantly. “Our infrastructure just works,” says Bevan. “We’ve definitely reduced the amount of service desk tickets.”
With reliably stronger performance, SSP’s digital infrastructure is positioned to meet whatever challenges or opportunities the business might face next. “We’ve gained a truly flexible hybrid environment with Azure Stack HCI,” concludes Castillo. “We can now provide better performing applications that really match and support the needs of our business.”
“We crunched the numbers after migrating to Azure Stack HCI and realized that year-on-year, we’ll be saving more than 100,000 kilowatt hours.”
Ben Bevan, IT Compute and Storage Manager, SSP Group
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