Stockmeier Chemie

Stockmeier Chemie – A modern data centre built for growth for STOCKMEIER.

Since 1920, the STOCKMEIER Group has been successful in distribution, production and services related to chemicals. With more than 50 locations across 14 countries, the family company continues to grow. In all, some 26,000 products are manufactured and sold to more than 30,000 global customers in many different sectors. In order to ensure that the STOCKMEIER Group’s IT infrastructure can keep pace with their rapid growth, Bechtle built a new network comprising nine servers, switches, and storage—and updated their virtualisation environment.

Project details.

Services

Dynamic Data Centre
Server & Storage

Industry

Manufacturing
Trade / Service

Manufacturer

Aruba, Veeam, VMware, HPE, Pure Storage

Company size

> 1,500 employees

Challenge.

The STOCKMEIER Group has been a family-run company for three generations. In 100 years, it has grown from a regional trading firm to an international group with over 1,800 employees at more than 50 locations worldwide engaged in distribution, production and all types of chemical services. All the companies of the STOCKMEIER Group are acknowledged specialists in their fields. To complete their chemicals portfolio, the independent family-owned firm from Bielefeld will continue to enter new markets and expand internationally.

For this quick growth, the STOCKMEIER Group’s IT infrastructure needs to be up to the job. When their existing IT environment needed to be updated after 5 years, it was also time to implement new, high-performing, scalable, flexible, and reliable IT that could also offer simple management. In addition to the on-premise production environment, the STOCKMEIER Group also wanted to update their virtualised environment and create a better connection with their data backup. The goal was to automate manual processes and simplify management of the IT environment as much as possible.

Because of our long-standing partnership with Bechtle, the design and strategy were quickly worked out together. The collaboration was always goal-oriented and frank, even when involving multiple Bechtle locations. Everything went smoothly. Our redesigned data centre is impressively manageable, future-proof, and boasts excellent performance!

David Bayes, IT Governance & Service Global IT, Stockmeier Chemie GmbH & Co. KG

Solution.

With Bechtle as a long-term partner in all IT-relevant areas, the STOCKMEIER Group was able to develop an innovative overall design for the new IT environment. Bechtle designed a cutting edge infrastructure to ensure future security and growth for STOCKMEIER based on HPE servers that would be connected to a network of HPE Aruba switches—two per data centre. Following a presentation of PureStorage, STOCKMEIER opted for storage from this brand. The homogeneous block and file storage is easy to use and powerful as it’s fully software controlled. It consolidates more corporate services such as large databases and many applications on fewer arrays to accelerate business critical workloads.

Bechtle installed the server, switches, and storage on data centres spread across multiple sites and set up all components in the newly created network in a way that they perfectly connect up. The backup is conducted on the storage with Veeam while the always-on data protection that’s integrated into the hardware protects the data against catastrophes and ransomware attacks.

The storage software can be fully integrated into VMware, which means that daily management is far simpler. Bechtle replaced the existing virtualisation environment with VMware, establishing an even stronger connection to the components in STOCKMEIER’s IT environment, making their IT more powerful and reliable.

Business benefits.

With the new IT infrastructure, the STOCKMEIER Group is well placed to swiftly and flexibly react to all future requirements. The performance boost that all systems have received along with the simplified management save IT working time that can be invested elsewhere. Despite their growth, the STOCKMEIER Group is therefore well positioned to run their IT globally with their current IT team. Even previously unknown new requirements are covered by the new IT infrastructure. It is flexible, reliable, and can be quickly scaled up as part of daily tasks whenever needed. And there will be no more IT limitations to hinder STOCKMEIER’s growth. New companies can easily and quickly link up with the family-owned company’s network—across Europe.