WEG is a Brazilian multinational electric-electronic equipment manufacturer. Founded in 1961 as a producer of electric motors, WEG has evolved into a global manufacturing giant with production plants in 15 countries, commercial operations in 37 countries and more than 39,000 employees. The company’s diversified product portfolio spans everything from electric drives and programmable logic controllers (PLCs) to industrial varnishes and wind-power generators.
At-a-Glance
Electronic equipment manufacturer WEG prioritizes innovation by continuously investing in research and development. This commitment extends to the adoption of cutting-edge technology like SUSE Rancher Prime – the company’s key platform for managing Kubernetes clusters. Rancher Prime has enabled WEG to embrace a modern, agile approach to application development. The SUSE solution reduces operating costs, complexity and development timelines, empowering WEG to respond to new requirements and bring products to market faster and more efficiently. By adopting SUSE Multi-Linux Support, WEG has also reduced costs and ensured its multi-distribution Linux environment remains secure.
WEG Improves Multi-Linux Support with SUSE
“Before Rancher Prime, infrastructure provisioning took days; now, we can get a new application environment up and running in hours – over 91% faster. It gives us a real shortcut to success.”
The journey to containers
WEG works to develop technology and solutions that contribute to a more efficient and sustainable world. To deliver cutting-edge products with the greatest efficiency, teams at WEG depend on a range of digital tools – whether Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software for managing complex projects or computer-assisted design (CAD) applications for developing and optimizing products.
With demand for modern, flexible applications on the rise, WEG sought to transform its development approach in order to better serve the needs of internal teams. As part of a push toward application modernization, the company decided to embrace containerization on the Docker platform.
As WEG’s container-based environment grew, the company faced a fresh challenge in finding an effective way to manage it all. A lack of standardization and dedicated management tools left WEG reliant on manual processes to provision infrastructure resources and manage Kubernetes clusters. With these shortfalls threatening development speed, efficiency and agility, WEG began the search for a proven container management solution.
Consolidating Linux environments
WEG uses various Linux operating systems extensively in its on-premises infrastructure, and it was concerned about the approaching end of support for some of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) environments. It wanted to find a way to keep receiving security patches and maintenance updates while avoiding the risk and disruption of having to migrate any of its existing Linux distributions.
The company also wanted to reduce the cost of its Linux subscriptions and to have a single point of support for its multi-distribution landscape. WEG looked for a way to bring all distributions under a single enterprise support umbrella, reduce complexity, boost security and compliance, and cut operational costs.
Why Rancher Prime?
After reviewing several options, WEG opted for a multi-cluster, microservices-based environment running in Rancher Prime. The SUSE solution gives the company a central platform that standardizes and simplifies the management of Kubernetes clusters. Rancher Prime also offers advanced tools for optimizing resource utilization and applying consistent security policies, allowing WEG to run large container environments efficiently and securely.
WEG has been steadily migrating its application estate to Rancher Prime. One key application now running on Rancher Prime is a management platform for large projects, which is integrated with WEG’s core SAP ERP system. The application helps to streamline the management of projects with long lifecycles and complex sales requirements.
Additionally, WEG took the opportunity to modernize and migrate multiple resource-intensive design and engineering applications to its containerized landscape. These include a high-scale solution for the electromechanical optimization of electric motors and a 3D design tool for mechanical engineers.
Why SUSE Multi-Linux Support?
After evaluating vendors including Red Hat, WEG chose to adopt SUSE Multi-Linux Support, a fully open technology and support solution that provides security patches and maintenance updates for RHEL. The SUSE solution enables WEG to continue running older versions of RHEL without disruption rather than having to migrate them, and it provides worldclass, enterprise-grade support. The company was able to simply switch its existing subscriptions to SUSE in a seamless and transparent way.
“Our transition to SUSE Multi-Linux Support from other distros was very smooth. No reconfigurations, no downtime. It was very nice and simple,” says Eduardo Piccoli, Solution Architect at WEG.
The impact of Rancher Prime
Increased productivity
Rancher Prime helps WEG to streamline infrastructure provisioning and container management. Automation of basic processes means the IT team spends less time on time-consuming administration and configuration tasks, so they can provision new environments faster.
Piccoli comments: “We’ve definitely noticed an improvement in development productivity. Before Rancher Prime, infrastructure provisioning took days; now, we can get a new application environment up and running in hours – over 91% faster. It gives us a real shortcut to success.”
Faster development and time to market
Thanks to Rancher Prime, WEG can more easily deliver the required technical resources for different applications and bring developers closer to the architecture itself. This allows developer teams to get started on new projects faster and speeds up the overall development process.
And with developers able to work faster, WEG can now also respond faster to new demands from both the business and its customers, and shorten time to market for new products. This adds up to a sharper competitive edge for the company.
Improved resource utilization
With Rancher Prime enabling more efficient container management and granular resource control, WEG has been able to optimize resource utilization and drive down costs.
The company can now segment computational resources on a per-project basis and set strict resource quotas within Kubernetes clusters. This helps ensure optimal performance while reducing operating costs.
This approach also lays the groundwork for a potential migration to the public cloud. With greater visibility of, and control over, resource utilization, WEG can ensure that it doesn’t pay for more hardware, power and other resource usage than it actually needs.
The impact of SUSE Multi-Linux Support
Lowered costs
With a single, standardized support and maintenance path for its entire multi-distribution Linux landscape, WEG has reduced its IT operational costs substantially. The organization estimates that it achieved a full return on its investment in SUSE Multi-Linux Support within just 12 to 18 months. “SUSE Multi-Linux Support allows us to have a single solution for our multi-Linux environment with lower cost,” says Piccoli.
Consolidated four distributions under one vendor
Choosing SUSE Multi-Linux Support has enabled WEG to replace four previous Linux distributions with a single vendor – without disruptive changes to its production landscape. The organization has secured the future of its heterogeneous Linux infrastructure and gained a single point of support.
“Because we were implementing Rancher Prime at the same time, we were able to centralize our support in SUSE, and it was very good for us,” says Piccoli.
SUSE Multi-Linux Support is fully open source, enabling WEG to keep its options open and be fully flexible in its long-term planning.
What’s next for WEG?
Having migrated its core application estate in Brazil to Rancher Prime, WEG is now working to implement additional clusters in remote branches throughout the country. When this work is complete, the company plans to unify its global business on Rancher Prime, which will mean extending the solution to operations across China, India, Portugal and the United States.
By adopting powerful platforms like Rancher Prime and centralizing multi-linux management with SUSE Multi-Linux Support, WEG is prioritizing innovation and will continue to drive technological advancement, enhancing its competitive position in the industry.