Invertek Drives Ltd design and manufacture variable frequency drives that provide energy efficient control of electric motors for a huge range of industrial and commercial applications. They help customers in over 80 countries reduce both energy consumption and CO2 emissions, enabling them to meet stringent global environmental targets, and make significant operating cost savings.
Empowering Invertek to help industry lower energy costs, reduce carbon emissions, and meet global CO2 targets.
The Challenge
Invertek celebrated its 21st anniversary in 2019 and over recent years growth has been exponential. They now employ around 190 people at a purpose-built site in Welshpool, with a further 60 around the world.
As the manufacturing process increased in sophistication and scale, it became apparent that their network, computing, data storage and back-up needed to be upgraded and brought together into a highly available, resilient and scalable solution.
“Milliseconds were starting to matter, and breaks in production were becoming very costly and inconvenient,” says Mike Edwards, IT Systems Administrator; “We had to eradicate down-time and prioritise the data running across our network. We needed a reliable, resilient and scalable ‘data driven’ solution to underpin business growth.”
Invertek set out to find an IT partner with accredited competencies in the leading technologies, and a willingness to work with them to create a bespoke solution for their demanding requirements – they asked Advatek to help them.
Bringing it all together
The existing network was unable to deliver the level of reliability and traffic prioritisation needed to support the expanding manufacturing process. A new network with Wi-Fi coverage across the site and with advanced security services is now in place, and is delivered by a
Fortinet Security Fabric solution.
This provides networking, visibility and protection for every segment, connected device, and appliance – whether in the cloud, or on-premises. The automated synchronisation of security enforces stringent policies, and deals with threats anywhere on the network. It also provides
management through a single easy-to-use console.
Intertek’s ageing server and storage arrangements were replaced with a streamlined Nutanix Hyper Converged Infrastructure, creating an agile datacentre platform that is easy to manage and will scale with the business. Their legacy data back-up process was taking too long, and with production now running from 6am to 10pm, across two shifts patterns, it was unsustainable.
The new Veeam back-up and replication solution supports Invertek’s virtual, physical and cloud-based data and workloads – and a connection to the Advatek datacentre in Manchester provides additional resilience. Through a single console, a process that used to take 10 hours now takes just 20 minutes.
Says Mike Edwards; “Accurate reliable data is crucial to our sophisticated manufacturing process. The new robust, reliable solution gives us confidence that nothing will be lost.
Built for the future
With a complete refresh of networking, compute, back-up and replication, along with on-going support from Advatek, Invertek now have complete confidence in the IT services that underpin their growing business.
“Real-time, reliable data is absolutely crucial to our business” says Adrian Ellam; “Dynamic information, crucial to our manufacturing process, is available in real-time to our production team as they assemble and test our products. We now have a solution that’s built for the future.”
