Our customer had aging equipment in 5 distinct computer rooms in 3 different states, in dire need of upgrades. They were not quite prepared to make the jump to a commercial IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) cloud, concerned with latency and exposure of their sensitive data to a 3rd-Party provider.

We proposed and implemented a consolidation project where we effectively created a redundant Private IaaS Cloud, using 2 of 5 the locations, phasing out servers at the other 3, effectively reducing both acquisition and operational costs while improving overall reliability and availability.

At a high level, the project involved

• Assessing current hardware utilization and projected growth for the next 3-5 years
• Implementing two (2) Microsoft Hyper-V/Storage Spaces Direct clusters using Dell hardware, at 2 of the customer locations in different state
• Establishing a dedicated WAN between the two sites
• Migrating all customer’s VMs from the old hardware to the new clusters, and virtualizing any remaining physical servers.
• Using both cloud location in an active-active paradigm.
  • Deploy VMs at the location closest to the users
  • But also replicate continuously all essential VMs to the remote location, thus achieving a disaster recovery strategy executable in minutes
• Completely revamped the customer network configurations (subnets and routes) allowing VMs to be active at either site with no change of IP address

As part of this project, we reduced the customers’ footprint from 50+ physical servers to 10, the number of virtual servers from 250+ to 150, significantly simplifying monitoring and maintenance activities and reducing operational costs.

Call us to discuss your struggles and pain points, and let us propose and implement cost-effective hardware solutions, or let us move you to the cloud!