Seehalde Foundation relies on the Virtual Datacenter

The Seehalde residential and employment home is dependent on secure and uninterrupted IT operations. PMI.AG implemented the infrastructure and relied on Xelon's Virtual Datacenter, which convinced with high security standards, simplicity and scalability.

The Seehalde Foundation offers 71 people with physical or mental-mental impairments a suitable living and/or working environment, accompaniment and support at the Rombach and Seon locations in the canton of Aargau. A simple, uninterrupted and secure IT infrastructure is central to the smooth running of the residential and employment home. "For me as the head of the foundation, IT is an important component for mastering day-to-day operations. However, large investments are always a challenge for us. When the renewal of our servers was pending, we looked for alternatives together with PMI. The main focus was on data security and backup solutions. Instead of in-house solutions, we looked for partners who are certified and have both their headquarters and the hardware in Switzerland," says Christof Hatebur, Co-Managing Director, Seehalde Foundation.

The Aarau-based PMI.AG implemented a virtual data center at the Seehalde Foundation and purchased the infrastructure for it from Xelon. The focus was on reliability, cost predictability, and the possibility to continuously expand the data center. "The vDC from Xelon was able to convince not only with its high level of functionality, but also with its cost transparency. The ability to plan the resources and the costs were decisive for the implementation of this project," says Luca Franek, Head of IT Services, PMI.AG.

Simple expansion of the infrastructure possible

Xelon provides a virtual data center. This is a flexible, scalable and highly available cloud environment in which resellers or end customers can independently map both individual Windows or Linux server environments and large geo-redundant infrastructures with servers, gateways, VPN and the like with just a few mouse clicks. This makes it possible to set up an infrastructure without investment costs and to easily expand the IT environment. PMI.AG can create and manage virtual machines (VM) for the Seehalde Foundation via a virtual front end. Luca Franek, division manager at PMI.AG was very satisfied with how the project went: "On the technical side, we were surprised how smoothly the migration went. Xelon supported our migration whenever questions arose." As a service provider, Xelon monitors the backend infrastructure and takes care of troubleshooting, enhancements and changes. Xelon guarantees 99.9 percent availability of the Virtual Datacenters network up to the carrier uplinks as well as the hypervisor, which are necessary for PMI.AG to operate the virtual machines at Stiftung Seehalde. Multiple server clusters with automatic failover and the redundant low-latency network infrastructure ensure fast and reliable operation.

No more unforeseen investment costs

Xelon's virtual infrastructure gives PMI.AG greater flexibility and scalability in managing the IT environment of the Seehalde Foundation. The virtual data center can be expanded according to the needs of the end users with just a few mouse clicks and billing is based on actual usage. The system measures the resources used on an hourly basis and there is neither a minimum quantity nor setup fees. The Seehalde Foundation, as the end customer, appreciates not only the reliability of the environment, but also the transparent cost control and predictability of financial resources.