Modernization and optimization of Ronal's IT infrastructure at the Jičín and Pardubice facilities

The RONAL GROUP, headquartered in Härkingen, Switzerland, with production facilities in twelve countries. Its RONAL Wheels division is one of the world's leading manufacturers of light-alloy wheels for passenger cars and commercial vehicles, employing around 7,000 people and producing around 19.8 million wheels a year. It focuses on innovation and sustainability through modern technology and investment in environmentally friendly production processes.

The customer decided to modernize the IT infrastructure in two key production plants in Jičín and Pardubice, where the existing systems had reached the end of their useful life. The brief for both sites was identical and included a complete refresh to ensure sufficient performance and expandable disk capacity for future needs. The primary goal of the project was to replace the aging infrastructure with a modern solution that would ensure stability, scalability and efficient operation at both sites.

At the outset, the customer considered several options, including HPE Simplivity hyperconverged infrastructure, which had already been used successfully at other sites. After carefully evaluating the options, they ultimately decided on a combination of HPE DL380 servers and HPE Alletra MP storage solution, which proved optimal for achieving their desired goals. The customer approached us based on previous positive experiences with our services and consulted with other manufacturing plants that had already successfully deployed similar technologies.

Based on the customer's needs, we designed a solution that included HPE DL380 servers, HPE Alletra MP disk arrays and HPE SAN switches. A key element of the infrastructure is virtualization using VMware vSphere 8, which enables the operation of a three-node HA cluster. This cluster provides high availability by being resilient to single component failures, ensuring failover during normal scheduled service activities and automatic service restart within minutes even if an entire HA cluster node fails.

The server infrastructure is dually connected to two LAN switches, PDUs and SAN switches at each site, ensuring maximum redundancy and reliability of the entire system. The virtual infrastructure is managed by the vCenter Management server, which is deployed as a virtual machine. This solution enables efficient management and performance monitoring across both plants and easily adapts to future capacity expansion requirements.

The implementation took place simultaneously at two sites and was divided into several phases. It was essential to work closely with the customer's IT team to ensure that all steps ran smoothly. During the implementation, we faced limited availability of SAN switches, which caused minor delays. The implementation itself took approximately two weeks of net time per site. After several months of operation, the customer is satisfied with the results - the infrastructure fully meets the performance, stability and flexibility requirements.