DXC Technology: Turning Ideas into Real Business Impact

With IT evolving quickly, organizations need innovative solutions to ensure business continuity and data integrity. DXC Technology, one of the world’s largest systems integrators, is widely regarded for its expertise in IT services and helping its customers meet such challenges head-on.

Jelle Wolthuizen, Product Manager, Managed Container Services at DXC Technology, explains, “We take on the difficult infrastructure work so our customers can focus on delivering innovations that make a big impact on their businesses.”

Modernizing Outdated Infrastructure

Wolthuizen is responsible for the company’s Managed Container Services offering, which enables rapid application deployment in Kubernetes container environments on any cloud, regardless of the underlying infrastructure. Customers’ development teams can take advantage of this deployment speed to deliver applications quickly as new business requirements emerge.

Among the prime customers to use the Managed Container Services platform was a large German bank with outdated infrastructure, including a legacy Red Hat OpenShift container platform that was nearing the end of its support lifecycle.

DXC Technology’s platform provided a much-needed upgrade with optimal performance and security for the bank. Additionally, the customer needed a robust disaster recovery (DR) solution to prevent disruptions and meet regulatory requirements for data availability. DXC Technology assessed several DR solutions and ultimately decided to follow Red Hat’s recommendation to implement Portworx® by Pure Storage.

“We were already working with the Pure Storage platform, but this was our first time using Portworx,” says Wolthuizen. “After evaluating how it could meet stringent recovery time SLAs, we selected Portworx Enterprise and Portworx DR to power DR for the bank and other Managed Container Services customers.”

Fast Recovery, without Data Loss

Having identified Portworx as the foundation for its disaster recovery strategy, DXC Technology implemented an active/passive Metro-DR solution in two data centers that enables the immediate replication of any changes made to data or applications on the source cluster to the destination cluster. This provided the bank with rapid synchronous data replication with a recovery point objective (RPO) of practically zero, meaning no data is lost in the event of an incident. It also delivered a recovery time objective (RTO)—the total recovery time after an incident—of less than 60 minutes.

After thorough testing of the failover and failback process, aligned with its clients’ other infrastructure components, DXC Technology decided to put the Portworx DR solution into production. Every six months, Wolthuizen and team rehearse the failover process to check readiness. Fortunately, a disaster situation has not occurred so far, but DXC Technology is ready to execute if needed.

DXC Technology also uses Portworx Enterprise as the container persistent storage layer for its Container DevSecOps Platform (CDP) that enables clients to rapidly build and change DevSecOps toolchains with their favorite tools and deploy applications to any Kubernetes platform. CDP is widely used by DXC Technology’s government clients in Italy.

Working Together on Challenges and Solutions

“One of the things I appreciate about working with Pure Storage is the collaboration,” says Wolthuizen. “The team is very open and willing to listen to our challenges and work together to find solutions. We also have regular conversations to get more aligned and arrive at the best solutions for our joint customers.”

Following the successful deployment of Portworx Enterprise, DXC Technology’s bank customer saw a significant improvement in data protection, with minimal downtime projected even during an incident. This reinforced the customer’s confidence in DXC Technology’s Managed Container Services. Encouraged by this success, DXC Technology expanded its disaster recovery offering to other customers, including a Dutch government organization.

The Future of Portworx at DXC Technology

Looking ahead, DXC Technology plans to continue expanding its Managed Container Services with Portworx to customers in other industries and regions, including the U.S. The company is also evaluating Portworx as a primary backup solution and plans to use Portworx with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization to provide a robust modern virtualization platform.

Organizations often struggle with the complexity of modern IT infrastructure. With Portworx, DXC Technology can mitigate risk, increase resilience, and support new growth opportunities for its customers.