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A digital transformation for mission-critical services

This large, global manufacturer is a world-leading provider of inks, press room products, color materials, and more for businesses around the globe. For years, they’ve supported mission-critical business needs like ARP, label printing, and financial systems out of their data center. In 2022, they undertook a migration to Azure for increased flexibility, disaster recovery, and a more granular handle on costs. 

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They began with a lift-and-shift migration strategy leveraging Azure migration tools. While they explored some cloud-native offerings, the primary focus was on deploying and running servers for their critical applications. For servers they spun up, the working default was to provision them at the one-day-a-year max capacity need. Without clear visibility into sizing needs and the ability to react quickly, they adopted a mindset of cautious overprovisioning, just in case.

Driving cost optimization and automation initiatives

The Data Center Operations team must manage a hybrid environment across their on-premises SAP system and their Azure footprint. To get the most out of their storage, they have ongoing initiatives for increasing automation and controlling costs. 

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In order to control costs and maintain flexibility, the company undertook a monthly process for scrubbing the environment of orphan disks and similar cost sinks. These ongoing cost optimization efforts were beneficial as part of steps to dial down their wasted spend and provisioned storage over time to something more manageable and cost-effective; however, these efforts consumed a significant amount of engineering time. 

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While working with a cloud partner on a project, they were introduced to Lucidity, and the value was instantly appealing. The ROI of Lucidity was compelling enough that they were able to fast-track the normal bake-off process and get right into testing. Once they saw it in action, the value was a no-brainer.

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The seamless impact of Lucidity

Lucidity AutoScaler eliminates overprovisioning on an ongoing basis through autonomous block storage rightsizing. This approach had an immediate impact on the company. Previously, when they noticed a server was running out of space, they would requisition an extra 200GB and wait three days to expand. With Lucidity, when a server crosses the utilization threshold, AutoScaler automatically expands the disk in seconds with no downtime or manual intervention. 

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In addition to automating provisioning, rolling out Lucidity has given the operations team more visibility into what different teams are doing with their data drives. With Lucidity, they found that some of their drive configurations were extremely expensive for their actual needs. By shutting those down and using half the disk capacity, they were able to realize significant additional savings. This was something they could only see at a single server level prior to Lucidity. “When one server is hugely overprovisioned, it’s easy to dismiss,” says the Manager of Data Center Operations. “But when we saw the scale of it across the full environment, we really recognized the savings potential.”

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With Lucidity, the manufacturer didn’t have to make any changes to their processes and everything works like it did before. What’s changed is they’ve cut out massively overprovisioned drives and eliminated the need to manually increase drive sizes. They used to expand drives 4-6 times per week, sorting through emails and tickets for the process, which chipped away at the team’s time. The automation that AutoScaler delivers has reclaimed all that time while avoiding downtime and other consequences that arise if the team didn’t expand drives quickly enough. 

Freeing up resources for new strategic initiatives

Spending wisely in the cloud is a never-ending initiative. Lucidity has plugged right into the company’s key initiatives with no disruption, freeing up resources that can be put towards strategic initiatives. “For our day-to-day, Lucidity is completely invisible to us,” says the Manager of Data Center Operations. “We only see it when we look at our monthly storage costs and see the dips from onboarding Lucidity to new servers. Costs are slowly decreasing over time rather than rising, which is not something you come across every day. I love to see it.”

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With their Managed Disk provisioning sorted, this global manufacturer is excited about finding new ways to increase the impact of their mission-critical cloud systems without getting bogged down in manual storage management.

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