Houtch
Sector
Activity
Since its foundation in 1965, family-owned company Houtch has expanded and specialized in six business lines: transport, distribution, logistics, co-packing, energy, and overseas. It employs 400 people and achieves annual revenue of close to €60 million.
Houtch has been using Reflex WMS to manage its 11 logistics warehouses in Hauts-de-France—the northernmost region of France—since 2012. The firm also regularly calls in Hardis Group to help it upgrade its IT infrastructure, including a system monitoring solution deployed in 2015, an overhaul of its LAN and Wi-Fi networks in 2019, and Dell EMC VxRail hyper-converged infrastructure rolled out in 2021.
“We’ve been working with Hardis Group for close to a decade now. They’ve become a trusted partner—always delivering on our WMS and wider IT requirements.”
Maxence Guerrier, IT Manager, Houtch
Project objectives
- Replace an out-of-warranty system that had reached its capacity limit
- Add more processing power to handle an increasing number of virtual machines
- Streamline IT infrastructure
- Make it easier to manage and update patches
- Deliver automation and security gains
Tasks performed
- Advising on and defining the target infrastructure
- Deploying the VxRail appliance: 80 virtual machines hosted at two remote sites with active-active redundancy
Benefits
- Streamlined IT infrastructure: hyper-converged architecture concentrated on one site
- Performance gains (increased processing power)
- Enhanced resilience in the event of an incident (active-active redundancy)
- Easier management and update operations