Legacy systems are considered a key barrier to digital business transformation and need to be modernized when enterprises are looking to increase the agility and efficiency of their IT infrastructure.

That is what happened to flooring distributor Swiff-Train Co., a business that is more than 80 years old and has opted to update its old on-premises system to reduce physical servers, energy consumption and the maintenance window.

“We have been moving forward with … hybridizing our infrastructure, making use of cloud where it makes sense. And when it came to our on-prem infrastructure, it was old; it was five, six years old, running Windows 2012, 2016,” said Greg Altman (pictured, left), IT infrastructure manager at Swiff-Train. “It was time to upgrade.”

Altman and Puneet Dhawan (pictured, right), director of product management, hyperconverged infrastructure, at Dell EMC, spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Dell Technologies World Digital Experience event. They discussed Swiff-Train’s experience with IT modernization, the reasons why the company chose to use Dell EMC solutions for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI, and the benefits of this strategy. (* Disclosure below.)

Single control panel makes management easier

The choice of the Azure Stack HCI was a natural path for Swiff-Train, which was already using Microsoft’s Azure and Hyper-V products and wanted to have all the management tools in one panel. The solution was delivered by Dell EMC, which adopts a product-centric approach to having different types of offerings designed specifically for Azure Stack HCI.

“We have done very specific integration to the management stack. We’ve been doing Admin Center — that is the new management tool for Microsoft to manage both on-prem, hyperconverged infrastructure, your Windows servers, as well as any VMs that you’re running on Azure — to provide customers … a single pane of glass for both on-prem as well as infrastructure on public cloud services,” Dhawan explained.

After working with Dell to define an ideal server size, Swiff-Train implemented the solution by following Dell’s guidebook. “I put together children’s toys that were harder than building the stack. I did it in an afternoon,” Altman said.

The technology has enabled Swiff-Train to achieve its goal of reducing the number of physical servers from eight or nine to three rack units of space. As a result, rack space dropped by 50% and energy consumption by 70%.

There was also a decrease in the maintenance window, which was long: about six hours a week patching and updating. Since switching to Azure Stack HCI, it has virtually no downtime, according to Altman.

“With the lifecycle management tools that we get with Windows Admin Center and Dell’s OpenManage plug-in, I log into one pane of glass in the morning, and I look and I say: ‘Hey, all my servers are going great,'” he said. “I know that day I’m not going to have any infrastructure issues, [and] I can deal with other issues that make the business money.”

Internal tests by Dell show that IT administrators in general can reduce the time spent on maintaining clusters by more than 90%, with more than 40% reduction in the maintenance window itself.

“And all that leads to your clusters running in a healthy state, so you don’t have to worry about pulling the right drivers, right firmware from 10 different places making sure whether they are qualified or not when running together,” Dhawan concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Technologies World Digital Experience event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dell Technologies World. Neither Dell Technologies, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE