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Customer use case · Large enterprise · illustrative composite

Four data centers.
One refresh window.

A national enterprise refreshes its estate with new Dell servers and commits to Azure Local as the hybrid standard — twelve clusters across four sites, hundreds of workloads to move, and a hard rule: nobody outside the network gets the keys. This is how agent-built deployment designs, deploys, migrates, and runs that fleet.

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The situation

A refresh wave bigger than the team that has to land it.

Virtualization renewal and hardware refresh land in the same budget year. The servers arrive on pallets; the clusters don't build themselves.

01
The estate

Four data centers, aging hosts

A national enterprise runs four data centers on five-plus-year-old hosts. The board wants one answer for the renewal and the refresh — not two projects.

02
The buy

Dell servers, many clusters

They standardize on Dell servers — dozens of nodes per site — and commit to Azure Local: clusters per site and per workload class, all governed with Azure.

03
The problem

Manual bring-up × twelve

Rack, BIOS, firmware, OS, Arc, cluster validation, AKS — per cluster, per site. Multiply by twelve and the plan turns into months of nights and weekends.

04
The ask

“Do it inside our walls”

Design it, deploy it, move the workloads, and run day-2 — without handing anyone outside the network the keys, and with an audit trail for every step.

The engagement

Design → deploy → migrate → day-2.

One platform carries the whole arc. AI accelerates the runbook; the customer's operators own every window and every cut-over. Timeline shown for the illustrative composite.

T0

Readiness scan

Estate inventory, network / AD / firmware readiness, constraint map. Fixed scope, fixed fee.

weeks 1–2
T1

Design

CAF enterprise-scale landing zones for both grounds, cluster topology per site, migration waves, security model.

weeks 3–6
T2

Build & migrate

Agent-built clusters per site in parallel waves — iDRAC to AKS, hands-off — then replicate → verify → cut over, workload wave by workload wave.

weeks 7–18 · 12 clusters
T3

Managed day-2

Validation before every change, firmware baselines, lifecycle and capacity, monitoring — one console, the customer's operators in the loop.

steady state →
12

clusters across four sites — the twelfth deploys like the first, because every stage is a script.

0

hands in the deploy loop — no human approvals from a cold iDRAC to a running AKS cluster.

2

grounds, one blueprint — the same CAF identity, policy, and resource model on Azure and Azure Local.

100%

of moves reversible by design — replicate-then-cut-over runs the same loop in either direction.

figures describe the illustrative composite engagement · deployment mechanics are the platform's documented behavior

Secure in the customer's environment

Built to run inside your walls.

The agent operates from within the customer's network boundary. Control, residency, and auditability are the product — not an afterthought.

Your network, your boundary

The agent drives iDRAC and hosts from inside the customer environment. Nothing requires inbound access from the internet to the management network.

Outbound-only control plane

Azure Arc governance is outbound connectivity from the estate to Azure. The perimeter stays closed — no VPN into the racks for us.

Secrets stay yours

Credentials are injected at run time from the customer's vault — never committed to a repo, never published, never in a slide.

Gated visibility

Public pages redact node names and addresses. The live console is access-key gated per engagement — operators and named client staff only.

Human-governed

AI accelerates the runbook; it does not own it. Deploy windows, migration cut-overs, and approvals stay with the customer's operators.

Auditable by design

Every stage is logged with status and telemetry. The registry and the stage ledger are the audit trail the compliance team reads.

Who does what

Dell hardware. AzureStack.NYC delivery.

Dell Technologies

Server platforms, supply chain, and field reach. Every refresh is a fleet this platform can stand up — attach design, deploy, migrate, and day-2 to the box.

AzureStack.NYC · Gus IT

The agent platform on Luca Express, NYC-based engineers, the gated console, and the day-2 run state. Independent — not affiliated with Microsoft.

Independent service — not affiliated with Microsoft. AzureStack.NYC is an independent offering operated by Gus IT on the Luca Express platform. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or a product of Microsoft Corporation, and holds no Microsoft partnership tier or certification unless separately stated. “Microsoft”, “Azure”, “Azure Local”, “Azure Stack HCI”, “Azure Arc” and “AKS” are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation, used here for descriptive and interoperability purposes only. Dell is a trademark of Dell Inc., used for descriptive purposes; this page does not imply endorsement by Dell. The customer story above is an illustrative composite, not a named reference. Cross-environment workload moves are replicate-then-cut-over (not live motion), and figures shown are illustrative unless tied to a named engagement.