Berry Global is a leading global design and engineering company in plastic products.
Berry Global is today a global design and engineering company in packaging and protection solutions. The group has nearly 50,000 staff with operations in 33 countries with no fewer than 290 locations, providing a geographical footprint that allows it to operate close to its customers.
In 2019 Berry Global undertook the purchase of Berry Global, one of Europe's largest supplier of plastic packaging and a turnover of £4bn, which expanded its reach from a predominantly American operation, to a truly global operation with a significant number of locations in each continent.
The group turned over $12bn in 2019.
Berry Global has manufacturing operations across many European countries. Being a supplier of plastic packaging for the food industry, where shelf life can be limited and stock turnover rapid, the resilience of its operations is critical.
In 2018, Berry (RPC at the time) had made significant investments in new HP compute and storage in the form of ProLiant and 3PAR. This improved business performance, and the intention was to migrate all workloads to this new hardware and have it provisioned in an architecture that it could easily assimilate other applications and services that were at the time hosted at remote sites. With continued business growth the IT team saw that that additional capacity and greater resilience was needed to be built into the infrastructure. They also needed to reduce the underlying complexity that had resulted from multiple mergers and acquisitions.
“The existing system we’ve been operating from for several years has, so far, met the demands of business as we’ve grown, both in terms of number of devices and higher demands on applications,” said Roger Mann, Berry Global’s Infrastructure Architect. “However, we needed more capacity and a simpler, more resilient network as the infrastructure was becoming more complex to manage and harder to control”.
Specific challenges the company was looking to overcome:
The initial work undertaken by WhiteSpider focused around Berry Global’s current data centre (DC) setup. They had confirmed in the initial discussions that the existing DC solution caused concern due to its potential resilience and the scalability required of their growing infrastructure. WhiteSpider carried out a detailed audit, which investigated both the technology (the infrastructure, configuration, architecture and usage etc) and the people (requirements, experience and expectations of a modern IT service).
This highlighted several areas of improvement to enable the busines to adapt to meet modern-day demands as required by a data centre within any organisation. These included:
The new HP Compute equipment has only helped get us so far, therefore we now need to look into ways to adapt this further and better-prepare our infrastructure to be even more future-proof.
To help address the issues they said they were experiencing, and potentially could experience in the future, Berry Global and WhiteSpider investigated different technology options. For each of these, the requirements of the business, and the solution capabilities were compared to select the solutions:
Berry Global selected Cisco HX with Cisco ACI Multi-pod as the solution. They also requested that WhiteSpider design, deploy, migrate and then manage the full solution.
Once the technologies were selected, WhiteSpider helped Berry Global transition from its current DC network to Cisco’s ACI Multi-Pod solution. As part of their requirements, Berry Global stated that this transition must be completed with as little downtime to their current network as possible. By working closely with Roger and his team, WhiteSpider was able to ensure this was adhered to, undertaking a number of migration workshops and planning days to define migration strategy and plan. There is much reason to operate across an ACI multi-pod solution, and in Berry Global’s case, WhiteSpider was able to work with the interconnected ACI networks so the solution aligned with the company’s policy on disaster avoidance and business continuance.
Cisco’s HyperFlex solution also formed part of the solution. This included the construction of a purpose-built, high-performance, low-latency hyperconverged platform that adapts to support any application, located in any cloud, from anywhere. This solution also complements the ACI multi-pod technology. Hyperflex unifies the ACI fabric network, even in the multi-pod setup which Berry Global is running, this will make it easier for them, and WhiteSpider to monitor and manage going forward.
To successfully assist Berry Global, WhiteSpider was able to implement the solution in an efficient, low risk and appropriately managed manner that follows internal frameworks which ensure projects are completed to the satisfaction of the customer, whilst addressing their business needs.
The impact of the new ACI platform has quickly been felt across Berry Global’s network, and its ambitious plans for enhancing services to staff are now possible with the new solution.
Roger Mann, Infrastructure Architect
The deployment of the new solutions enabled the IT team at Berry Global to improve resilience, simplify the infrastructure and enable scalability. Further, these ‘software defined’ technologies have enabled Berry Global to centralise operations and enhance security.
Berry Global was, however, faced with a transformation in terms of operation and management of the new solutions. In order to ensure their team was not overly stretched by having to learn how to operate the new technologies and invest in new management tools, Berry Global appointed WhiteSpider to operate the ACI and HX technologies.
WhiteSpider’s service provides Berry Global with a number of key capabilities:
The service is designed to take the pressure off Berry Global’s internal IT teams and outsource the management of the infrastructure to WhiteSpider allowing Berry Global to progress and develop its infrastructure further. It now means WhiteSpider will actively be monitoring Berry Global’s ACI and Hyperflex solutions for any fault and performance issues, provide support with their hardware issues connected to these and monitor the latest releases from Cisco providing Berry Global with advice on the best routes to take to develop their infrastructure in line with their business needs.
“WhiteSpider’s support team provides an extra ‘in-house’ team monitoring and managing on our new ACI and Hyperflex solutions,” said Roger. “It has made the transition to the new solutions seamless, relatively painless. With the SLAs WhiteSpider provides – and team we trust in the background – we are confident of our ability to provide a stable, efficient and scalable service to our business.”
Established in 2012, WhiteSpider specialises in providing consultancy, strategic advice, and practical support in enterprise service architectures. The company helps organisations to standardise their IT and communications infrastructures by using a unique new service framework – ea4 – developed specifically with the needs of global enterprises in mind. Headquartered in the UK, WhiteSpider works with global companies across a range of industry sectors, including financial services, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, construction and motorsport.
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