MISAWA HOMES CO., LTD.
Misawa Homes implements Colt solutions to build a highly available IT environment with carrier-grade redundancy
Colt & Misawa Homes implement Wave, Ethernet Line & Ethernet VPN
Business Challenge
Misawa Homes is a housing company striving to contribute to the building of an affluent society by supplying quality homes. As a pioneer in the housing industry for more than 50 years, its motto is: “Lifelong commitment to customers through housing.” In addition to building houses, Misawa Homes builds diverse homes and facilities including refurbished apartments, buildings, hotels, rental housing and the development of compact-city-type real estate incorporating multiple functions such as healthcare, nursing, and childcare. Misawa Homes used to maintain its accounting and mission-critical systems, internal file servers, and other systems with 300 physical servers.
The company was hesitant to migrate to the cloud because it was not sure about the security of the connection via the Internet. In 2012, the company decided to migrate to AWS as the dedicated cloud access AWS Direct Connect became available.
By migrating its systems from physical servers to AWS, Misawa Homes reduced the burden of hardware maintenance and management while shortening the time for server recovery from 6 hours to 30 minutes. “By migrating to AWS, we no longer have to be aware of hardware, and instead, we are able to focus on our own business,” said Mr. Morishima. However, the company eventually faced a challenge where the bandwidth for existing lines was insufficient during the AWS Direct Connect maintenance, due to tight bandwidth for backup lines. Another challenge was that, when Windows Updates were distributed from the WSUS server in a specific AWS VPC, to about 10 thousand devices simultaneously, the company was not able to maintain stable communication for other missioncritical processes. Therefore, the company decided to review its network environment to solve these challenges.
Colt has offered a fully redundant configuration combining services with different backbone lines, enabling us to have stable cloud connectivity with a communication environment connecting multiple offices while significantly reducing TCO. We are very satisfied with the quality of Colt's network as well as the comprehensive support in building the IT environment.MISAWA HOMES CO., LTD. Associate Director / Systems Planning Unit Information Systems Devision Hiroyuki Morishima
Why Colt?
Misawa Homes compared and reviewed multiple providers and chose Colt, which allows the company to increase the existing backup bandwidth tenfold while cutting running costs by half. Colt offers a redundant configuration with the optical dedicated connection (Colt Wave) as a main line for AWS connection, Colt also offers a dedicated Ethernet line (Colt Ethernet Line) as a backup line, combining different backbone lines. This addresses the challenge of response performance decline of the main line due to high traffic of the WSUS server during the Windows Update distribution, and avoided limitation of bandwidth by using the backup line as a bypass line. “In addition to Colt’s proven reliability supported by the rich track records and SLAs in the financial industry, we chose Colt for its strong technological capabilities. Colt responded to our requests and challenges appropriately and promptly, which allowed us to design an optimal network environment,” said Mr. Morishima.
Besides cloud connection, Misawa Homes has also implemented Colt Ethernet VPN as an in-house network for connecting group locations. This service ensures continued operation in case of failure with automatic rerouting within only 50ms. “By reviewing our IT environment with Colt services, we saved more than 20 million yen in TCO. We are very satisfied with the availability with carrier-grade redundancy, combining different backbone lines through a single agreement with Colt,” said Mr. Morishima
Future Plans
For future business growth, Misawa Homes is considering cloud migration of most of its 160 physical servers currently run in HaaS. A stable IT environment is essential to run about 500 servers in AWS in the future. “Normally, it takes time to implement and increase/decrease the speed of dedicated lines. However, Colt has a fibre network of its own and quickly responds to our request for increasing the speed of existing lines. As cloud use is expected to expand, we also recognise Colt highly for their scalability” said Mr. Morishima.
As Misawa Homes works to expand its business globally to countries such as Australia and North America, it is expecting a further expansion of its IT infrastructures. “We hope that Colt continues helping Misawa Homes group’s service operation both in Japan and other countries, based on its high-quality broadband networks and strong technological capabilities,” said Mr. Morishima
The case of Misawa home gave us lessons to learn/made us confirm the accuracy of our HBW strategy in the market; The market was working on the digital transformation which was shifting their platform from On-premise to Cloud(AWS). Also the customer recognizes our network solution value which they ought to keep high performance by HBW; HBW solution gives them TCO saving which they can handle with speed and security.
The case study of Misawa Home supports us to approach Construction ; The case study gives us a confidence to work in these market by the Misawa’s market presence, a trusted position with long history and major player in the market and it gives us advanced position as Colt is trusted provider by Misawa. The customer can use various services like Colt DCA, Ethernet , VPN services and Colt was the only provider to be able to meet their demands in terms of redundancy and cost performance.
COMPANY NAME
Misawa Homes Co., Ltd.
INDUSTRY
Construction
CHALLENGE
To deliver a low-latency, broadband network with high availability, strong redundancy, comprehensive technical support & strong cost efficiency.
COLT SOLUTION
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