Case Study: Data Center Modernization Delivers Savings, Simpler Management

The Challenge

One of the world’s largest manufacturers and distributors of HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) products was experiencing what many companies do prior to working with Netsync―unnecessarily high costs, poor IT solutions, complex management, poor response times to meet the demands of business, and employees unable to spend time working on important projects and initiatives.

In addition to its data center assets reaching End-of-life (EOL) and End-of-support (EOS), managing their data center in-house was expensive in both hard and soft costs. They were paying for costly service and maintenance agreements on their existing equipment and their IT staff had to push projects to the backburner to manage the antiquated data center. It wasn’t uncommon for mission critical applications to be down for up to a week. And they were having serious challenges meeting their RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) goals.

Thankfully, they had previously turned to Netsync to successfully deploy several innovative solutions. They knew that Netsync’s empirical experience and technical expertise, when combined with its key partner relationships, would help them solve their array of data center issues.

Understanding Workloads and Current Architecture is Key to Designing a Perfect Solution

Prior to designing a data center solution, Netsync worked closely with the client on a consultative basis to first understand their current architecture, their mission critical workloads and applications, and issues related to each.

Netsync designed a Proof of Concept (POC) architecture that replicated their current architecture, which would enable them to verify how the solution would accommodate their precise needs. Netsync’s design included equipment from 3 of its key partners, including Cisco, PureStorage, and Veeam.

For the past 18 years, Netsync has closely partnered with Cisco, the leading developer and manufacturer of networking hardware, software, telecommunications equipment, and other high-technology services and products. Overnight, Netsync integrated new Cisco UCS (Unified Computing System) servers to handle compute, and deployed Nexus and Catalyst switches from Cisco. Cisco Nexus switches deliver low latency, proven, high performance, density up to 400G, low latency, and exceptional power efficiency. Cisco Catalyst access switches bring wired and wireless together to dramatically simplify operations.

Netsync deployed All Flash array and FlashBlade from 10-year-old data storage solutions provider Pure Storage. The Pure Storage FlashBlade is the industry’s most advanced file and object storage platform for unstructured data. It’s built to consolidate data silos to accelerate discoveries and help customers gain valuable insights.

In addition, Netsync deployed Veeam software, which provides backup, disaster recovery, and intelligent data management for virtual, physical, and multi-cloud infrastructures.

Proof of Concept Proves Netsync’s Solution Works Flawlessly

In less than 24 hours, Netsync’s experts stood up the entire solution in the client’s data center. The design, implementation, and operation proved flawless. The client went through their backup and recovery plan and verified Netsync’s solution could handle their mission-critical workloads. In addition, Netsync provided training to ensure their personnel fully understood their new data center solution.

Naturally, the solution was fully implemented to support their entire organization, which includes almost 15,000 employees in over 200 offices worldwide. Within a month of deployment, all their workloads were migrated to the new solution and their old infrastructure was retired.

Hard, Soft Cost Savings and Enhanced Performance are Big Parts of the Story

Along with having a cutting-edge, modern data center solution, the client enjoyed soft cost savings by enabling its IT professionals, who had been trying to manage their antiquated, complex data center, to concentrate on other projects and initiates. They are enjoying a 3-year savings of almost $1 million in OPEX (Operational Expenditures) and greatly enhanced performance. What was taking 4 hours to launch was reduced to a 4-minute boot, and backup and recovery windows went from 48 hours to 4 hours.