Coughlan Companies was in the process of a capacity purchase and upgrade of their existing infrastructure, which led to an overall platform review. Prior to deploying HPE SimpliVity Hyperconverged Infrastructure, they found the management of multiple solutions and vendors to be manageable, but not ideal. The company was looking for a solution that could simplify their IT infrastructure and improve performance.

NewPage, a leading paper manufacturer in North America, was facing a high-cost, outdated legacy infrastructure. The company was maintaining an impressive 95% virtualized infrastructure, but the rigid “silos” of legacy compute servers and expensive, complex SAN-based storage were inhibiting the team’s ability to scale to meet business needs. The aging and underperforming 50TB EVA8000, 46TB EVA4400, and 150TB VNX5500 were also due for a refresh. The virtualized environment was becoming increasingly difficult to scale and manage, resulting in diminished productivity. The team of ten was spread thin managing their 166 RU legacy systems. The legacy infrastructure’s physical requirements continued to increase, a 100% virtualized infrastructure seemed increasingly unlikely.

NewPage Corporation was facing challenges due to the management of multiple solutions and vendors, which was manageable but not ideal. They were looking for a solution as part of a data center migration or consolidation initiative. The company was in need of a solution that could help them avoid managing multiple vendors and the associated multiple maintenance cost streams. They were also looking to consolidate their data center footprint and save on electricity and air conditioning.

Central One Federal Credit Union was facing challenges with their existing infrastructure. They were in the process of a capacity purchase and upgrade which led to an overall platform review. The management of multiple solutions and vendors was proving to be a significant burden for the company. They needed a solution that could consolidate their data center, modernize their infrastructure, and support their Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), production applications, and test/dev and QA processes.

The IT team of a New England-based Credit Union had been managing slow, steady growth in their environment for several years. Until recently, they maintained a non-virtualized environment, with over 30 physical servers, each dedicated to a specific application workload. Driven by the need to improve their DR capabilities and the concern that they would soon outgrow the physical capacity of their two data centers, the IT team decided to pursue a “P-to-V” migration project, implementing VMware and deploying virtual machines for each of the existing physical servers. In planning this project, the team recognized the need for an infrastructure update that aligned with the flexibility and scalability that VMware enables. After a detailed analysis, the team chose to adopt Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) SimpliVity, HPE SimpliVity’s federated and hyperconverged infrastructure platform that delivers high-end data protection and management functionality, while enabling dramatic cost savings compared to traditional infrastructure.

Abba Technologies, an IT services and solutions provider based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was facing several challenges with their legacy infrastructure. The company was dealing with long backup times, multiple complex management consoles, and their infrastructure was nearing its end-of-life. The company was running Exchange, SQL, and other customer-specific applications which were becoming increasingly difficult and slow due to their outdated infrastructure. The company was faced with the decision of whether to update their existing infrastructure, which would involve a costly upgrade but allow them to avoid a complete renovation of their IT environment, or switch to a new technology that could address their goals of updating old equipment and simplifying their IT infrastructure.

Abba Technologies was operating its IT environment on a complex system that included 9 ESXi hosts, fiber channel switches, two enterprise class storage arrays, several different backup solutions, and 7.5TB of off-site deduplication backup. This created a complex management environment for Abba Technologies and its customers. The company's five-year-old legacy infrastructure was nearing its end-of-life utility and a hardware refresh was needed. The company was faced with the decision of whether to update its existing infrastructure, which would involve a costly upgrade but allow the company to avoid a complete renovation, or make the switch to a new technology that could address its goals of updating old equipment and simplifying the IT infrastructure.

Abba Technologies purchased HPE SimpliVity Hyperconverged Infrastructure as a result of a data center migration or consolidation initiative. Prior to deploying HPE SimpliVity Hyperconverged Infrastructure, they found the management of multiple solutions and vendors to be a burden.

The IT department for the City of Arvada needed to update its Computer Aided Dispatch and Record Management System (CAD/RMS), a critical application that drives dispatching and logging for the emergency 911 services and police employees working around the city. The existing system was running on Cisco Blade servers connected to a Dell Compellent SAN, and this configuration was becoming too expensive to augment and maintain effectively. The department looked for an affordable, efficient, reliable, and easily manageable solution that would enable the IT staff to maintain the high-end levels of service expected by the city staff. They also needed to improve their disaster recovery capabilities.

The Credit and Investment Ombudsman (CIO) was experiencing growth challenges within its IT. The organization’s new levels of growth required a new data platform for the next chapter in the organization’s life. The legacy IT infrastructure was designed for the early stages of the organization’s operation. CIO was running all their applications on physical servers, and they had not invested in virtualization. Their legacy infrastructure impaired CIO’s ability to expand and adapt to new business growth. It was time to make a change. CIO was challenged by managing a cluttered data center of aging hardware and software. Their physical environment consisted of general purpose Dell servers with built-in storage. The physical stack consumed multiple racks in their data center. The complex infrastructure ran Microsoft Small Business Server and other database servers. The servers were dedicated to running specific applications such as WebApp, Database, email messaging, accounting and various line of business applications.

The University of Namibia (UNAM) was looking to refresh their entire legacy infrastructure and simplify the management and maintenance of their systems. They were facing challenges with data center consolidation, infrastructure modernization, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), supporting Tier-1 applications, and virtualizing their physical infrastructure. They approached Salt Essential IT, a value-added reseller of SimpliVity, for advice on available VDI solutions. After several meetings and a Proof of Concept (POC) on Pivot3, a tender was offered for Pivot3. However, SimpliVity's OmniCube had become available and was presented as a potential solution.

The Neenan Company and NexCore Group, both operating in the construction and real estate industries, were facing challenges with their existing disaster recovery methods. As the quantity of data grew between the two businesses, so too did the disaster recovery requirements within their data centers. They were in constant danger of a crippling hardware failure, which could result in downtime up to, and even exceeding, 48 hours depending upon how many hard disks were damaged. In addition to the serious recovery-time disadvantage, both companies had significant concerns regarding natural disasters and potential damage to the physical equipment within the data centers. Given the weekly tape pick-up cycle, they were seeking a better system that did not risk an entire week’s worth of work. While improving both companies’ disaster recovery capabilities was a top priority, they also saw an opportunity to conduct a technology refresh of the two data centers and leverage a new solution to reduce annual maintenance and operating expenses.

The Neenan Company was facing challenges with their existing IT infrastructure. They had a mandate to implement Disaster Recovery (DR) and improve their backup and recovery systems. The management of multiple solutions and vendors was proving to be a burden for them. They were looking for a solution that could consolidate their data center, modernize their infrastructure, and provide support for their remote and branch offices. They also needed a solution that could handle their production applications.

The Town of Newington’s IT department faced an infrastructure that was becoming increasingly complicated. As the IT environment continued to expand, more ports, connectivity, interconnects, and cabling meant that the team of five was fighting a constant uphill battle when trying to diagnose system issues. In addition to this, the Town of Newington’s host count was growing along with the VM app and storage growth. The team’s two data centers were quickly running out of space, and with nine out of 15 possible TB used up, it was only a matter of time before further scaling would be necessary. The town’s backup and DR capabilities had grown outdated and required an upgrade. For years, Newington had been using IBM TSM and a complex, manual LTO tape rotation process for backup and DR. However, upgrading this system would have entailed a complete restructure of the backup solution and reconfiguration of all backup jobs. The IT team was tasked with finding the best virtualized, automated platform that would offer disruption-free backup and DR with minimized upkeep.

The Town of Newington was facing a challenge with the management of multiple solutions and vendors. Although it was manageable, it was not ideal. They were in the process of a capacity purchase/upgrade of their existing infrastructure which led to an overall platform review. This review led them to consider HPE SimpliVity Hyperconverged Infrastructure as a potential solution to their challenges.

Nuh Cement, a global producer and supplier of cement, ready-mixed concrete, and building products, was facing challenges with its legacy IT systems. The systems were becoming increasingly inefficient, risky, and expensive. The manufacturer’s siloed IT infrastructure included legacy servers and stand-alone storage systems—all deployed in a single data center. The company’s IT department relied on a variety of data backup and recovery tools for data protection. Disasters or hardware failures had the potential to impair critical IT services and disrupt business; restoring applications could take hours or even days using the legacy data protection solutions. Dissatisfied with the performance, reliability, and economics of its aging information systems, Nuh’s IT team launched a business transformation program to upgrade the company’s IT infrastructure.

Salt Essential IT, a small business in the computer services industry based in Namibia, was facing challenges with their existing infrastructure. They had to manage multiple solutions and vendors, which was manageable but not ideal. This led to a capacity purchase and upgrade of their existing infrastructure, which in turn led to an overall platform review. The company was looking for a solution that could consolidate their data center, modernize their infrastructure, and support their production applications, test/dev and QA, and data migration.

One Source Networks (OSN) was developing multiple new services to meet the evolving needs of its global enterprise customers. When tasked with rolling out the company’s new Cloud Lync Enterprise offering, they decided to broaden their scope beyond traditional servers, SAN and storage architectures. The new infrastructure had to be world-class to support the robust Cloud Lync Enterprise service, while delivering operational improvements. OSN’s Cloud Lync Enterprise is a fully-managed, dedicated offering that provides organizations with the feature functionality and security of a premises-based Lync environment, with the global scale and cost efficiency of a hosted service.

Princess House, a leading online retailer of housewares, crystal and collectables, was facing challenges with its aging IT systems which were becoming increasingly inefficient, risky and costly. The retailer’s legacy IT infrastructure included Dell PowerEdge servers and EqualLogic storage systems—all deployed in a single data center. The IT department relied on four different data backup and recovery tools to protect a variety of enterprise and line-of-business applications. Using the fragmented data protection solutions, the IT team was able to back up fewer than 30% of the company’s virtual servers. Disasters or equipment failures had the potential to impair IT services and disrupt business; restoring critical applications could take hours or even days using the legacy data protection solutions. Dissatisfied with Dell’s customer support, and unhappy with the performance, reliability and economics of the company’s aging IT systems, Sean Lane, IT Manager for Princess House, initiated a data center modernization program.

Saddleback Valley Unified School District (SVUSD) was facing a 25 to 35 percent annual storage growth rate, which required constant management of its 50TB iSCSI SAN through costly annual expansion. The school district had approximately 100 VMs managing a myriad of heavyweight, mission-critical applications such as collaboration software, Web servers, multiple SQL databases, and a massive, 3,000-user Microsoft Exchange Server. Each year, Rich Dear, Systems Manager at SVUSD, had to expand the school district’s iSCSI SAN to accommodate application performance and user data growth. In addition, SVUSD’s server infrastructure was in need of an upgrade. The IT team was also looking to reduce its data center footprint along with the associated energy costs and management overhead.

Syntrophos, a Shared Service Center founded by four cities in the Netherlands, provides high quality ICT, GEO-information, and consulting services to over 120,000 citizens, as well as seven smaller governmental agencies. The company employs over 1400 staff and has a dedicated IT team of eleven focused on running and maintaining its mission-critical applications. With applications such as Oracle 11g; Microsoft SQL Server, DFS, and IIS; Horizon Workspace; CheckPoint Firewall; and Apache Webserver in its physical data centers, end user access to these critical services is a key priority. However, with plans to migrate all virtual machines and consolidate the four cities’ data centers by early 2015, Syntrophos faced major consolidation challenges and needed a solution that could virtualize and migrate the entire IT environment while supporting its Tier-1 applications.

Westmoreland Intermediate Unit (WIU), a regional educational service agency in Pennsylvania, was faced with a vexing problem. Their legacy IT environment could no longer handle their growing VMs, and were quickly running out of capacity for optimal operations and data protection. The WIU had two Promise Arrays, totaling 4TB of storage, attached to two Intel Modular Server chassis, each containing 14 internal disks with 6TB of internal storage. Their entire environment had about 12TB worth of storage, but the WIU quickly discovered that it was no longer sufficient. The decreasing capacity was growing to be more than an initial annoyance and had the predicted consequence of forcing them to reduce the number of backups in order to conserve their lessening storage capacity. Their key mission-critical application, a 2TB Microsoft Exchange server supplying over 3000 mailboxes to users in the numerous school districts, were using Veeam backups to send data to the TwinStrata CloudArray with Amazon S3. While the WIU was backing up their applications daily with five restore points, some larger VMs, such as Exchange, could undergo only one restore point due to capacity restraints. The WIU also faced additional frustrations with extremely long backup times of up to eight hours using Veeam, and then only being able to retain those backups for a week. When backing up to cloud, the process took even longer, usually upwards of 48 hours to migrate everything.

The Worcester County Sheriff’s Office had been operating on an outdated DIY IT infrastructure. The IT team was running all of its operations on a 16-server, legacy HP infrastructure with a complex, expensive SAN and storage. The small team in IT was forced to cope with a large data center footprint that was complex to scale and manage and had no automated backup and DR capability whatsoever. In addition to dealing with the outdated, cumbersome legacy infrastructure, the IT team was operating under the constant threat of major data loss. With no service level agreements implemented for RPOs and RTOs within its infrastructure, the office’s mission critical applications were always at risk.

Altamaha Bank and Trust, a Georgia financial institution with approximately $150M in assets, was facing challenges with its legacy IT infrastructure. The existing system, a mix of Dell and other servers with internal storage scattered across four branches, had become too costly, complex, and risky to maintain and scale. Expanding capacity or introducing new applications meant deploying additional physical servers—an inefficient and time-consuming prospect. Moreover, the bank was constrained by an ineffective data backup solution that relied on removable media. Hardware failures or application mishaps had the potential to disrupt business for hours or even days while systems were recovered.

Altrecht, a leading Dutch mental healthcare provider, was facing challenges with its legacy IT environment—a mix of Dell servers and EMC Clariion storage systems—which was running out of capacity and approaching end-of-life. The provider was seeking innovative ways to reduce IT expenses in light of shrinking budgets and growing government regulations. They needed a solution that would ensure high performance and resiliency for their critical applications, while significantly reducing equipment and operations expenses.

The IT team at the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE) was in search of a Storage Area Network (SAN) solution that would meet their needs for storage consolidation, efficient tier-1 backups, and disaster recovery. This need became especially clear when the AUPE’s main building was flooded during an icy Alberta winter, causing significant damage to their data center. The team spent over 18 months meeting with various vendors and suppliers and conducting audits of AUPE’s requirements. They eventually realized that a SAN purchase alone would not meet all of AUPE’s needs. In addition to storage consolidation, they needed a solution that could handle their backup, replication, and remote office management challenges. They were also facing servers and computers that needed to be refreshed and found it difficult to predict growth and expand storage.

The Alberta Union of Provincial Employees was in the process of a capacity purchase/upgrade of their existing infrastructure. This led to an overall platform review. Prior to deploying HPE SimpliVity Hyperconverged Infrastructure, the organization found the management of multiple solutions and vendors to be a non-issue. However, they decided to move forward with the HPE SimpliVity Hyperconverged Infrastructure for data center consolidation and infrastructure modernization.

BICS, a medium-sized enterprise in the telecommunications services industry, was facing challenges due to the centralization of management for remote/branch office infrastructure. The management of multiple solutions and vendors was not an issue for them. However, they were in need of a solution that could modernize their infrastructure, provide a technology refresh, and support their remote/branch offices, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), and production applications.

Blundstone’s aging IT systems were becoming increasingly inefficient, risky and costly. The retailer’s legacy IT infrastructure included virtualized legacy servers with iSCSI storage systems, running a variety of business applications. The IT team relied on several distinct backup and replication tools including Symantec Backup Exec and Veeam for data protection and recovery. Deploying new workloads–allocating compute and storage resources, configuring data protection policies–could take weeks using the company’s legacy tools. Worse still, disasters or equipment failures had the potential to impair IT services and disrupt business; restoring applications could take hours or even days using the disjointed data protection solutions.

Brigham Young University was facing significant challenges in managing multiple solutions and vendors. The management burden was high and the university had a mandate to implement Disaster Recovery (DR) and improve backup/recovery. The existing infrastructure was not efficient and was causing delays in deploying new workloads.