Scalable IT infrastructure for a complex, global pharma distribution business

Challenge

Expensive, inefficient and complex legacy infrastructure

Uniphar provides sourcing and distribution solutions to pharma and medtech manufacturers. The business has a worldwide workforce of 3,200, is a trusted partner to over 200 manufacturers and delivers to 160 countries.

To continue with its ambitious plans and to maintain excellent client delivery and service standards, Uniphar needed a new, robust and efficient IT infrastructure. This would enable better connection and collaboration in a large, global workforce. More automation would improve efficiency and cost effectiveness as well as improving the use of data for reporting and decision-making.

To maximise the benefits of the latest technology, Uniphar's IT leaders wanted to pave the way for full digital transformation with a future-proofed infrastructure platform. Uniphar also needed to improve its disaster recovery processes to match the scale and complexity of the current organisation.  

As in most successful, well-established organisations, Uniphar had a lot of legacy IT infrastructure. Systems and applications had developed and expanded incrementally to meet evolving business needs. There was no clear oversight of how everything integrated and worked together. Managing this unwieldy infrastructure was a drain on time, resources and budgets.

Solution

A proven approach to HCI with HPE SimpliVity

ProCloud's team spent time understanding the nature of Uniphar's operation and IT needs before proposing a solution. It was clear to us that there was an exciting opportunity for Uniphar to dramatically improve efficiency and simplify control with HCI.

We developed a bespoke infrastructure solution for Uniphar using HPE SimpliVity. Our long experience deploying this leading-edge technology meant we could demonstrate the benefits in practice, from established and successful hyperconvergence projects for a range of clients. Uniphar's IT team saw tangible evidence of the efficiency gains and savings they could expect, which gave them strong confidence to proceed.

ProCloud radically simplified Uniphar’s existing data centre infrastructure by hyperconverging the entire legacy IT footprint below the hypervisor onto three x 2U HPE ProLiant Servers, enabling high availability and disaster recovery. The new hyperconverged infrastructure was integrated via an on-premise StoreOnce backup appliance, using the Microsoft Azure cloud to deliver offsite data backup.

Results

Enterprise infrastructure for maximum efficiency and future global growth

The new, hyperconverged solution has finally allowed Uniphar to do away with the legacy infrastructure that was proving so ineffective and inefficient. Now, Uniphar has freed up IT resources and dramatically reduced IT management costs by automating and semi-automating many processes, including workstation provisioning.

With centralised management based on universal VMWare skills, Uniphar's IT team has full oversight and control of all its systems, applications, connections and data. It's simple and quick to initiate routine tasks and maintain high performance levels.

A leading disaster recovery solution is built in, with protection and resilience to meet the demands of a growing, global company transacting with hundreds of demanding clients and partners.

Key benefits of the new infrastructure include:

• Ability to manage core IT infrastructure and virtual machines from a single dashboard
• Robust disaster recovery protocols and 100% data availability
• Significant cost savings: 80% physical footprint reduction, 50% savings compared to the legacy SAN and a 60% reduction in software licensing costs
• Hyperconverged infrastructure that supports critical real-time digital capabilities such as production planning with demand forecasting, global consignment tracking, enablement of industrial IoT and document and data traceability.