abilis transforms data center network in one day with Apstra

As an innovative, growth-oriented company, abilis wanted to refresh its data center infrastructure for greater business agility and operational efficiency.

“Our data center network was increasingly difficult to maintain,” says Christian Kluger, head of IT infrastructure at abilis. “Our goal was to reduce our maintenance windows so that we could meet our customers’ needs more easily.”

abilis wanted to take a software-defined approach to its data center and began investigating ways to increase agility without the need for CLI and programming expertise.

“We also have a shortage of manpower,” says Andreas Knobloch, senior system engineer at abilis. “We needed a solution to support our daily work, such as setting up VLANs and checking switch configurations. Doing that work manually takes time, and there is the possibility of making an error if it’s not assisted by software.”

A modern, automated data center network allows abilis to more efficiently deliver IT solutions to its customers, including hosted SAP and Microsoft Azure services and its own FlowDOCS business process automation and calcIT configure, price, and quote software.

“With Apstra, we can provision our customers’ hosting environments faster and deliver better managed services to our customers,” says Kluger.

Apstra provides predictive insights, powerful analytics, and root-cause identification that allow the abilis data center team to quickly pinpoint and resolve issues. Automation and change controls diminish human error and reduce maintenance windows.

“Apstra gives us better insight about overall performance, and when there are issues, we can analyze the problem much faster,” says Knobloch.

Apstra has freed up the system engineering team in other ways. “We no longer need a network engineer at the data center site to make changes,” says Knobloch.