Refreshing Retail IT Infrastructure – Ensuring Business Continuity for a Major Cebu-Based Retailer

Ng Khai Development Corp. partnered with a major retail chain based in Cebu to address critical IT infrastructure challenges and ensure business continuity for their operations across the Philippines. The retailer’s centralized on-premise corporate data center, running all mission-critical workloads, was facing significant issues due to aging hardware.

The Challenge: The retailer’s existing infrastructure relied on 8-year-old servers running in a virtual environment. These servers were nearing the end of their lifespan, out of warranty, and experiencing performance degradation – leading to:

• Aging Hardware: Servers were decaying and nearing end-of-life.
• Lack of Support: No longer covered by warranty, increasing maintenance costs and risk.
• No Backup Strategy: Absence of proper backup solutions, creating a significant vulnerability.
• Diminishing Returns: The retailer was struggling to extract value from their initial investment, with any savings from delaying a refresh outweighed by ongoing maintenance expenses.

Ng Khai’s Solution: We proposed a cost-effective Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) solution that not only delivered excellent value but also simplified the migration process. Our approach included:

• HCI Deployment: Replacing the outdated server environment with a robust, integrated HCI platform.
• Migration Support: Providing comprehensive migration support to minimize downtime during the infrastructure refresh.
• Disaster Recovery Implementation: Establishing a secondary HCI cluster in Luzon, ensuring business continuity in the event of a primary data center outage – implemented following the “3-2-1” backup best practice, utilizing three copies of data on different media with one offsite copy.

The Results: Ng Khai’s solution significantly improved the retailer’s IT operations and strengthened their business resilience:

• Modernized Infrastructure: Transitioned to a reliable, future-proof HCI environment.
• Scalable Growth: The modernized HCI environment runs on modern hardware and support, meaning future growth is possible by adding more nodes.
• Reduced Downtime: Minimized disruption during the migration process through expert support.
• Enhanced Business Continuity: Implemented a robust disaster recovery solution, safeguarding mission-critical workloads and ensuring rapid business resumption in the event of a Luzon-based data center incident.
• Data Protection: Ensured robust data protection through the implementation of a “3-2-1” backup strategy.