CUSTOMER STORY

Keeping IT infrastructure under control is an ongoing challenge for fast-growing organizations. This is no different for Aerospacelab, the Belgian start-up that builds satellites and has grown to a company of 175 employees in four years. Dell Technologies and its integration partner Proximus SpearIT not only provided the hardware for the company, but also ensured a reliable and secure IT infrastructure with the Dell vSAN ready notes.

This enormous growth has been accompanied by numerous challenges. For instance, the IT department had a tall task to keep up with in a short space of time. And that's when a reliable partner can make all the difference. "At the start of Aerospacelab, there was no IT department. The engineers who worked here installed their computers themselves as if they were for home use," says IT manager Benjamin Colart. "Today, our IT team consists of five specialists. We have a lot of knowledge ourselves, which enabled us to work on a secure and reliable IT architecture on our own. But our enormous growth meant that we faced a lot of challenges."

One of the obstacles Aerospacelab came up against into was the amount of hardware the company needed to get everyone working. "We hired more than 100 people in six months. Each of them needed a laptop, a computer screen, keyboard and mouse. It was very difficult for many suppliers to supply a lot of hardware in a short time, especially just after the pandemic" Mr Colart adds. "This is how we ended up with Dell Technologies through our partner Proximus SpearIT. They were the only supplier who managed to deliver all the hardware very quickly."

Besides hardware, Aerospacelab turned to Dell Technologies to modernize its IT infrastructure also. "The choice of Dell Technologies was pretty obvious," says Benjamin Colart. "Their range of solutions continues to evolve, so Dell Technologies can always meet our demands"

In addition to end-user hardware, Aerospacelab needed reliable and secure servers. The development of satellites and the related AI software requires a lot of data that need to be stored and secured, and at the same time very accessible. "We will need to be able to process exabytes, or even petabytes, of data in the near future," Mr Colart continues. "We were therefore looking for an infrastructure which would be scalable so that we can continue to grow in the future and which would be able to keep up with our IT as well."

Aerospacelab's IT department chose Dell Technologies in partnership with Proximus SpearIT to modernize the infrastructure with vSAN Ready Nodes. The solution uses VMware vSAN and provides compute, storage, connectivity and availability capabilities. Moreover, this hyper-converged infrastructure can start small and then scale up capacity and performance without heavy investment or planning. Thanks to such scalability, VMware vSAN has elicited the interest of governments, financial sector companies, healthcare and thus technology companies. "Dell Technologies has the expertise to help us make the right choices and to set up a secure and high-performance IT infrastructure that can be expanded over time," Mr Colart says.

The PowerEdge R7515 Rack Servers provide the necessary reliability and storage capacity and can be expanded at a later stage. The servers pack more than enough power to handle workloads such as software-defined storage, virtualization and data analytics. "Dell Technologies managed to transform our old, small infrastructure into a reliable and well-secured one," adds Benjamin Colart. "Our business was growing so fast that it was difficult to grow along on the IT front as well. Thanks to Dell Technologies, we are on the right track and we hope carry on that way," Benjamin Colart concludes.