Werner & Mertz – New Dell EMC reduces operating expenditure

Werner & Mertz – New Dell EMC reduces operating expenditure.

For over 150 years, brands such as Frosch, emsal and Green Care Professional have become mainstays in people’s homes thanks to Werner & Mertz GmbH, located in Mainz, Germany and Hallein, Austria, producing products with the aim of putting sustainable living within the reach of us all. The company also had one eye on the future when it came to restructuring its own data centre. Bechtle replaced what was there with a Dell EMC VxRail solution allowing the VMware environment to run consistently and be maintained at the touch of a button.

Project details.

Services

Dynamic Data Centre
Server & Storage

Industry

Manufacturing

Manufacturer

Dell

Company size

250 – 1,500 employees

Challenge.

Back in 1901, a frog on a tin of innovative shoe polish made Werner & Mertz famous. Over 150 years since its founding, Werner & Mertz is still making an impact on the market with its new developments and doing its bit to protect the environment through improved recipes for its cleaning and care products for both commercial and professional use. Erdal, Frosch, emsal and Green Care Professional are widely known brands and demonstrate the company’s commitment to environmentally sound and sustainable business approaches. Within the scope of this drive towards sustainability, Werner & Mertz were also looking to rethink its IT to help save energy and operational costs. For this reason, the company planned to install its own data centre during construction of a new production site in Mainz. The IT environment in place required a lot of manual intervention, but in the future, the company wanted to leverage SAP 4/HANA and thus reduce the work required to install patches through automation. Werner & Mertz were searching for a server environment that was certified for VMware and SAP 4/HANA, automatically installed updates and came with interfaces to hyperscalers such as Microsoft to enable the use of a cloud environment in the future. The new on-prem system also needed to be linked up to it with ease.

The new platform implemented by Bechtle is very stable. Thanks to the Dell EMC VxRail, we are not only SAP HANA-ready, but also SAP 4/HANA-certified. We could always rely on Bechtle’s professional advice and were even able to speak with other customers already using the system. The professionalism and partnerships were very important to us. Today, we know that choosing Bechtle as our partner was absolutely the right decision.

Andreas Dreide, Head of Group IT, Werner & Mertz GmbH

Solution.

As a result of Werner & Mertz’s requirements and desire to have a hyperconverged infrastructure, Bechtle recommended a solution based on Dell EMC VxRail. The VxRail instance is directly integrated in VMware enabling Werner & Mertz to directly link up its 300 virtual machines (VMs) running in the environment and maintain them at the push of a button. After Bechtle held a requirements workshop and a qualitative performance analysis had be carried out at Werner & Mertz, it quickly became clear that the Dell EMC VxRail solution could be ideal. During a telephone conference with Bechtle and on of the IT partner’s reference customers, Werner & Mertz were able to get a better idea of the solution. While the company also looked at other hyperconverged systems on the market, the collaboration with Bechtle and the fact that the Dell EMC solution was both SAP 4/HANA-certified and developed for VMware made a decision easy. Werner & Mertz thus commissioned Bechtle to set up a Dell EMC VxRail server infrastructure in its new data centre.

The company also purchased Dell and VMware Premier Support packages and that, combined with Bechtle’s support, means the company is more working with a ready-to-go environment that allows for continuous innovation. Patches are now installed at the push of a button. The VxRail platform is certified for SAP 4/HANA that should run on the environment in the future. Server and storage virtualisation run stably and update pretty much automatically. Werner & Mertz can scale up the stack whenever they need to and migrate services to the cloud.

Business benefits.

On top of SAP 4/HANA certification and the integrated VMware system, Werner & Mertz have reduced operating expenses thanks to the Dell EMC VxRail environment running in its own data centre. A lot if manual work is now taken care of automatically by the new server infrastructure, relieving the company’s IT and enabling it to invest its knowledge and time into new IT projects instead of maintaining the server landscape.