Outokumpu is the global leader in sustainable stainless steel production. Based in Finland, the company makes most of its steel from scrap and recycled materials, which gives it an enviable carbon footprint compared to the competition. The company’s latest product line, called Circle Green®, has a 93% lower carbon footprint compared to the global industry average.
Outokumpu had long relied on Citrix-based Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), but that reliance created operational challenges. “Citrix is complicated and requires specialized skills to maintain,” said Jani Anttila, Outokumpu’s Service Manager for Virtual and Platform Services. “On top of that, we were locked into multi-year contracts with rising costs. It was a difficult situation.”
Anttila and his team needed a solution that would simplify VDI management while avoiding long-term contractual commitments and high upfront costs.
Seeking operational efficiency and cost savings
The company first migrated its desktop infrastructure to Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD). This was an obvious choice for a company that had already migrated computer resources to the Azure cloud. “Going to Azure Virtual Desktop was easy,” Anttila explained, “because we just had to republish the applications on different platforms since we already had the servers on Azure.”
Managing the AVD infrastructure was more complex. AVD’s out-of-the-box management did not allow dynamic auto-scaling or provide other tools to optimize operational efficiency and cost-savings. “If you want those really valuable management features,” Anttila stated, “you need a better management platform than out-of-the-box AVD.” Outokumpu chose Nerdio.
Moving to Nerdio made technical sense, as expected, but it also made business sense. “The structure of Nerdio’s deals is completely different,” Anttila noted. “It is a pay-as-you-go model, whereas Citrix had a multi-year contract with upfront payments. Obviously, we saved a lot of money, but we also moved from capital expenses to operational expenses.” As a Service Manager, it’s much easier for Anttila to find the budget to pay for actual consumption instead of one or two million euros as an upfront technology payment.
Right-sizing all around
For Anttila, the strength of Nerdio is its ability to manage resource consumption. He points out that should a merger or divestiture occur, a company might gain or lose hundreds or thousands of employees. The inability to manage consumption means that you are either unable to adequately serve employees, or you’re left paying for resources you’re not using.
Nerdio allows organizations to scale up and down instantly. “For example,” Anttila specified, “out-of-the-box AVD requires that you have session hosts there waiting for people to log in, and then they start up or shut down based on the need. With Nerdio, I can spin up new virtual machines (VMs) whenever they are needed. I can consume zero resources when nobody is using the system, and once someone arrives, it will automatically create the VM.”
In addition, Nerdio’s ease of use removes management burdens while enabling users. “What Nerdio brings to us,” Anttila continued, “is an easy interface with which we can enable our application owners with service capabilities to manage their own VDI setup. One amusing way to put is that Nerdio lets me turn my problems into application owners’ problems. I’m able to right-size the responsibilities within our organization.”
Reducing risk and ensuring business continuity
For a company like Outokumpu, downtime is particularly damaging. “For example,” Anttila explained, “we know that downtime for one of our applications costs €200 per minute. That is €288,000 per day, and that is only one application. We have 1500 applications. Start thinking about how much the downtime costs.” Nerdio helps mitigate downtime risk. By integrating Nerdio with Rimo3, a tool that tests patches against customized operating system images, Anttila knows the impact of a change before deployment. “By using Nerdio and Rimo3,” he said, “I can reduce the number of incidents, and even if there are incidents, I can reduce resulting downtimes.”
In conclusion, Anttila points out that Service Managers like him are there to serve end users, and Nerdio makes that easier and more efficient. “Let’s say they need to deploy an application on AVD,” he concludes. “With the help of Nerdio, I am providing a platform where they can do it independently. Instead of me creating a request requiring five days’ labor, they can do it themselves in 15 minutes.”
Ready to see how Nerdio can help your organization simplify IT operations and reduce costs? Book a demo today!
