ARS Simplifies Cloud Management

Lenovo ThinkAgile CP platform, powered by 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, helps remove barriers to cloud services.

At a glance:

  • Administration Réseaux et Systèmes (ARS) helps corporations to optimize their IT capabilities, offering digital services including strategic consulting, hosting, backup, recovery, and comprehensive service management.

  • ARS outsourced large-scale infrastructure to a third-party vendor. Lenovo ThinkAgile CP 6000 Series allowed them to bring infrastructure in-house, offering a greater range of services as well as cutting external costs.

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Launched in 2005, Administration Réseaux et Systèmes (ARS) helps corporations to optimize their IT capabilities, offering digital services including strategic consulting, hosting, backup, recovery, and comprehensive service management. The company serves more than 250 clients, supporting networks, computing, telephony, data storage, and analytics systems.

Navigating the Journey to the Cloud

Many ARS clients operate a wide mix of applications—some on-premises, some hosted by ARS, some on public cloud services. But because business is never static, what works best in-house today might be a candidate for hosting or the cloud tomorrow. However, moving applications is generally not a simple matter.

Data security and physical location may also be limiting factors for cloud enablement, resulting in complex hybrids of on-premises, hosted, and cloud systems that can be surprisingly difficult to flex.

Jérôme Cournut, President of ARS, begins: “Delivering the kind of flexibility clients wanted was a significant management challenge. How could we create a solution that would enable clients to build new services quickly and easily, worrying less about the supporting infrastructure and focusing more on the success of their project?”

Taking a New Path

The ARS team selected Lenovo ThinkAgile CP 6000 Series, a composable cloud solution equipped with 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, and Lenovo software.

Jérôme Cournut comments: “In our experience, Lenovo and Intel make a great combination. When it comes to running virtualized landscapes for clients, we always select Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs so that we can be sure of optimal performance and compatibility, with high energy efficiency and low TCO.”

Using the ThinkAgile CP Cloud Controller management console, ARS can compose compute, storage, and networking components into pools that span stacks or sites, enabling multi-tenant provisioning.

Jérôme Cournut explains: “The ThinkAgile CP solution allows clients with only limited IT skills to manage the basic elements for themselves, such as creating a new virtual machine. This makes it exceptionally easy for clients to achieve their business objectives, while we supply the high-level service and the underlying hosting infrastructure as a service.

“For example, our client eMana sells AI-as-a-service for the automatic classification of inbound email to very large corporations and has no appetite for investing in their own Nutanix infrastructure. With the ThinkAgile CP solution, we can offer a fully managed service that eMana can scale flexibly as it wins new customers.”

Why Lenovo? Cloud-like Experience on Premises

Previously, ARS operated a relatively small in-house physical estate and outsourced large-scale infrastructure to a third-party vendor. The team realized that the ThinkAgile CP solution would allow it to bring infrastructure in-house, using multi-tenanting capabilities to offer a greater range of services as well as cutting external costs.

“Moving to our Lenovo ThinkAgile CP will give clients more agility,” remarks Jérôme Cournut. “By switching to ThinkAgile CP we can give them immediate control over their infrastructure, and they gain the advantages of cloud-like operations while knowing exactly which storage server contains their data. This gives them public-cloud agility combined with individual autonomy and the advantages of a private cloud.”

As more ARS clients move to the ThinkAgile CP solution, they will gain the ability to move applications from one platform to another. For example, a new service developed on a local ThinkAgile CP environment can be moved to the ARS platform without change and scaled up for production, removing the technical, cost, and management challenges of hybrid operations.

Jérôme Cournut explains: “ThinkAgile CP offers new opportunities for global clients, as they can migrate applications to new infrastructure at the same monthly fee but with far greater functionality and possibilities. On the ARS infrastructure, clients will be able to optimize the capacity and performance for themselves. Particularly for situations where a marketing campaign can produce huge spikes in workload, as is the case for eMana, migrating to the ARS ThinkAgile CP infrastructure will give them scalability, capacity, and performance in an easily managed container.”

He concludes: “With ThinkAgile CP, we can deliver a private cloud solution that has the advantages of the big public clouds but with specialized local support. We know that, perhaps for data security reasons, clients will operate their own mix of on-premises, public cloud, and hosted services with ARS. With the ThinkAgile CP solution, we can deliver hybrid services with a unified interface, helping them achieve their business objectives.”

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With ThinkAgile CP, we can deliver a private cloud solution that has the advantages of the big public clouds but with specialized local support.” —Jérôme Cournut, president, Administration Réseaux et Systèmes