Piquadro

The Company 

Piquadro is an Italian brand of professional and travel leather goods that produces items with innovative design and high technological content. These are products in which factors such as Italian craftsmanship, the quality of fine leather and attention to detail stand out, elements that reflect the three distinctive values that inspire the brand: design, functionality and technology.

Piquadro sells its products in over 50 countries around the world through a distribution network that includes about 100 single-brand boutiques in Italy and abroad. In 2012/13 the Group’s consolidated turnover was 56.3 million Euro with a consolidated net profit of 3.2 million Euro. The Piquadro Group employs about 693 people worldwide. Since October 2007 Piquadro SpA has been listed on the Italian Stock Exchange.

The company was founded in 1987 by Marco Palmieri, who still holds the position of President and Managing Director. The headquarters is a futuristic building constructed in 2007 in Gaggio Montano, a village in the hills of the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines halfway between Bologna and Florence. Design, planning, purchasing, quality control, logistics, marketing, communication and distribution are carried out here.

Confirming its strong orientation towards innovation, Piquadro has recently become the protagonist of an important Data Centre evolution project with a view to Business Continuity thanks to the consultancy of VEM sistemi. Today, thanks to the new virtualisation and consumption optimisation technologies, Piquadro can count on a high-performance and high-availability infrastructure, to the benefit of the business.

Objectives

Service continuity is a crucial factor that a publicly traded company like Piquadro must necessarily take into account. This entails the need to adopt a modern technology platform capable of meeting new challenges. Throughout its history, Piquadro had followed a strategy of distributing services across different machines in such a way that, in the event of a server failure, the applications not hosted on that machine would continue to operate—thus containing the damage caused by hardware malfunctions. However, this architecture was becoming outdated due to the evolution of Data Center technologies and the growing adoption of virtualization as a more suitable approach to meet new needs: simplified management, cost containment, and energy efficiency.

“The result was a Data Center made up of numerous outdated machines,” says Paola Vivarelli, Head of Information Systems at Piquadro S.p.A., “some of which could hardly support any further maintenance services.”

The need was therefore identified to increase the reliability and security of the IT infrastructure through the redundancy typical of virtualization and business continuity projects. The company needed to guarantee continuous operations in case of issues with physical servers.
Piquadro, being listed on the stock exchange and pursuing ambitious revenue targets, could not afford to operate without a system that ensured full functionality.

“The entire company depends on the Data Center—we simply couldn’t risk, for example, a shutdown of the automated warehouse or a blockage of our management software.”

The need for redundancy in core business services was, therefore, non-negotiable. Additionally, there was the impact of the old IT infrastructure on energy consumption. “The older machines generated heat that was difficult to dissipate,” adds Vivarelli. “The cooling system could not adequately lower the temperature, and the heat further endangered company data and, as a result, the productivity of our colleagues. Updating the hardware was becoming a fundamental step.”

Solution

The project was launched at the beginning of 2012 following a tender in which VEM Sistemi also participated, and according to Vivarelli, it proved to be the most prepared, the most competent in the field, and the most experienced company. The solution implemented by VEM Sistemi involved the complete virtualization of the server room using Cisco, NetApp, and VMware technologies.

In parallel with the virtualization project, VEM built a business continuity site with the same technological features as the main server room, since security in support of operational continuity had been a core requirement from the start. “It’s a remote node where a daily alignment of all the main virtual machines is carried out,” adds Vivarelli.

The backup site will allow, in the event of a fault in the main server room, the execution of the most critical virtual machines necessary to ensure the continuity of essential services for Piquadro’s operations—starting with ERP, automated warehouse systems, Sales Force Automation, and retail management software.

The choice of a virtualized Data Center architecture also enabled Piquadro to optimize the space dedicated to servers. “The solution proposed by VEM allowed us to reduce the footprint of the 20 previously used servers into a single rack—a much leaner and more easily maintainable structure.”

Results

Secondo Andrea Giuliani, Cloud Technology Team Leader di VEM sistemi, si è trattato di una sfida tutt’altro che banale, considerando la situazione da cui Piquadro partiva e gli obiettivi che l’azienda si era posta. “Collaborare a progetti di questo livello ci consente di mettere in campo la nostra esperienza in materia di Data Center e virtualizzazione”, sottolinea Giuliani. “Le aziende innovative come Piquadro colgono il reale valore di una infrastruttura moderna che deve oltre a rispondere alle esigenze contingenti essere in grado di crescere con il proprio business”.

Non a caso, nelle aziende moderne l’informatica e le reti sono sempre più avvertite come servizi irrinunciabili dati per scontato, commodity la cui indisponibilità è fuori discussione. I benefici di una infrastruttura di Data Center affidabile e performante e al riparo da rischi di downtime non sono quindi percepiti come un valore aggiunto. Ma chi gestisce il business è sempre più consapevole che una piattaforma ICT che non dia problemi è il fattore che mette in condizione tutta l’azienda di funzionare al meglio. “L’amministrazione di Piquadro è fortemente orientata all’innovazione”, sottolinea Vivarelli, “e il passaggio a una architettura virtuale è stato visto molto positivamente come piattaforma abilitante per la produttività aziendale”. Il fatto che il progetto sia stato portato a termine in modo molto trasparente e senza impatti (disservizi o rallentamenti operativi) nel corso della migrazione alla nuova piattaforma fa parte del successo raggiunto. “L’azienda è complessivamente molto più serena e può comunicare ai propri investitori di svolgere il proprio lavoro con un livello di sicurezza IT adeguato”.

Il nuovo Data Center di Piquadro è stato inoltre pensato secondo i paradigmi del Green IT, una tematica sulla quale le aziende sono sempre più attente per coniugare, grazie all’innovazione tecnologica, il profitto alla sensibilità ambientale. “Dopo l’attività di virtualizzazione abbiamo immediatamente constatato un notevole calo della temperatura nella sala macchina con conseguente riduzione del consumo energetico”. Dotarsi di dispositivi di nuova generazione, pensati per supportare la aziende senza gravare sui costi di esercizio, costituisce un investimento intelligente e lungimirante per abbattere gli sprechi e i consumi. “Visitando la sala server ci si rende conto dell’effetto termico dei nuovi apparati. Avevamo molte aspettative da questo punto di vista, i risultati sono stati ancora superiori”.

Anche il giudizio sull’operato di VEM sistemi è positivo su tutti i fronti. “VEM sistemi ha realizzato un ottimo progetto in ambito virtualizzazione e parallelamente su progetti di rinnovo del dominio e della posta elettronica”, conclude Vivarelli. “Il suo apporto è stato decisivo”.