SMC Merges IT to Improve Business Ops

SMC Corporation of America – a leader in pneumatic technology that provides products to automate manufacturing for an array of industries – runs operations in hundreds of locations worldwide and relies on dozens of largely independent IT departments to keep those operation going – which makes it increasingly difficult for the organization to collaborate and innovate. The answer to this challenge: a global IT environment.

SMC turned to Dell Technologies to help build 11 data centers in 12 months, with the aim of improving efficiency and allowing teams to better collaborate and innovate.

“We are building 11 new data centers worldwide in 12 months,” Chris Cerny, global IT manager for infrastructure and architecture at SMC, said in a customer case study. “We harness this power to bring greater value to how we produce and ship [automate manufacturing] products and deliver results for our customers.”

SMC standardized on a hyperconverged IT infrastructure using VMware Cloud Foundation on Dell VxRail. With so many of its applications in the cloud, SMC counts on the versatile hybrid cloud platform to effectively unify and manage both traditional VM- and container-based applications.

“We’re running multiple IT environments from around the world – large-scale supply chain systems, ERP, CRM, and file and email servers. VxRail lets us easily scale, allowing us to add hardware or reconfigure storage or networks for new functionality or capabilities as needed,” said Mike Loggins, global vice president of IT at SMC.

Jon St. Arnaud, global infrastructure manager at SMC, explained that the organization also is able to quickly spin up private clouds and make them portable across multiple workload domains, or even data centers.

“It’s all so fast and efficient – we simply drop in a new node and minutes later, our servers are where they belong,” St. Arnaud said.

In addition, the organization also benefits from capabilities within the VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail, which lets engineers in Japan, Europe, and the U.S. work together on large CAD files and 3D modeling. Specifically, a virtual desktop infrastructure within the solution enhances the digital workspace experience for engineers while reducing costs and delivering products faster to customers.

SMC also turned to Dell PowerScale and Dell ECS enterprise object storage to address the enormous demands the organization was facing with resource-intensive applications and artificial intelligence. The Dell PowerScale OneFS operating system integrated seamlessly and provides the flexibility to distribute workloads across clusters or teams based on resource needs and available processing.

“We don’t wind up with 20 or 30 storage pools doing the same thing – and our storage can grow and expand as needed,” St. Arnaud says. “PowerScale and ECS put us in the best position to provide private cloud services anywhere around the globe.”