Our Customer's Home Cloud Journey
How it saved on costs by moving from Azure Cloud & VMware-centric workloads to a homegrown platform.
Automating the Modern Supply Chain
The customer is an automation technology leader reimagining the global supply chain with an end-to-end, AI-powered robotic and software platform. Its system powers automated fulfillment for enterprise giants across grocery, retail, and wholesale supply chains — orchestrating complex fleets of autonomous robots to process billions of dollars in inventory with maximum accuracy, speed, and density.
Key Highlights
Rapid development iteration, mixed workload support (VMs, bare-metal, and containers), and high-throughput, low-latency compute.
Advanced machine learning, distributed AI workflows, and real-time fleet orchestration.
From Split Estate to Unified Control Plane
The customer's AI-powered warehouse automation engineering estate ran split across Microsoft Azure/Google Cloud and a legacy on-premises VMware footprint, with Dev, QA and production environments on separate hardware islands under a rising licensing bill.
TrndX instituted its orchestration platform to create a balance between usage and IT infrastructure needs by building a reimagined cloud inside the customer's own colo-data centre — VMs, Kubernetes and bare metal on one control plane, seamlessly working with the other legacy setup, operated as code. Non-production migrated first, production followed, with no disruption to running workloads.
The result: >50% reduction in cloud ops cost, gaining cloud-like agility, freedom from VMware licenses, and a future-ready architecture.
Key Results
Paying Twice for the Same Capacity
Split Estate & Double Costs
Non-production workloads were split between Azure, Google Cloud (metered recurring costs) and underutilized VMware (per-core licensing fees), forcing the customer to pay twice for the same capacity.
Fragmented Environments
Dev, Q/A and production environments ran on separate hardware islands, each with its own operational overhead. TrndX was able to design a customized architecture to solve this.
Storage
Existing storage was licensed and not on premises.
One Control Plane, Any Workload
The customer's new environment is based on TrndX's UniFlex solution. At its core is the TrndX Orchestration Platform (TOP), a resource-abstraction layer that lets the customer's teams consume compute, unified storage and networking as a service inside their own data centre, independent of the hardware beneath.
The Deployed Architecture
Two racks, each carrying its own high-availability control plane, KVM/Kubernetes/bare-metal compute, and Ceph storage, connect through a 25/100G leaf-spine fabric with dual inter-rack uplinks back to a shared corporate core network. GPU/AI-accelerated compute and additional JBOF storage live in Rack 2, with reserved capacity held in both racks for future growth. An isolated out-of-band network (BMC/IPMI, Redfish API) handles management traffic separately from the compute and storage data planes, while MAAS, Ansible, Terraform, monitoring/logging and CI/CD pipelines automate provisioning, configuration and observability end to end.
Solution Highlights
From Capital Project to Repeatable Platform
The customer expanded its engagement in stages, scaling the platform as each phase proved its production reliability — infrastructure shifted from being a capital project to a repeatable, programmable platform their engineering teams can rely on day-to-day and grow over time.
| Milestone | Scope & Deliverables | Business Impact |
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| Phase #1 Stabilizing at Home |
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| Phase #2 Building Private Cloud |
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| Phase #3 Scaling Non-Production Capacity |
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| Phase #4 Vertically Scale (Roadmap) |
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Operating Outcomes
Total Cost Control, Fully Utilized
The customer previously struggled with a split estate — paying metered costs in Azure while paying per-core VMware licenses for underutilized on-premises hardware. This fragmented setup created operational silos and high overhead.
No Cloud & Virtualization Lock-In: Migrated off Azure & replaced VMware with TrndX Compute Hypervisor-based virtualization.
Scaled into 5X Nodes: With a clear roadmap toward full production workloads.
Achieved Immediate ROI: By cutting cloud operations costs by over 50%.
Ultimately, the customer gained total cost control, predictability and performance of a fully utilized homegrown cloud — backed by premium management support from TrndX.