Online retailer turns to SimpliVity to modernize IT infrastructure and improve disaster recovery
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Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- SimpliVity OmniCube
- OmniCube CN-3000
Tech Stack
- Microsoft SQL Server
- Microsoft Exchange
- Microsoft Active Directory
- Microsoft Sharepoint
- Microsoft Lync
- XenApp
- Thatcher Prowess
- IBM Cognos Business Intelligence
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
- Customer Satisfaction
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Applicable Industries
- Retail
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Discrete Manufacturing
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Princess House is a leading online retailer of housewares, crystal and collectables. The company 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.
The Challenge
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.
The Solution
After a thorough investigation process involving a number of vendors including Dell, Nutanix® and ExaGrid™, Lane selected SimpliVity OmniCube hyperconverged infrastructure systems for its next-generation data center architecture. SimpliVity OmniCube eliminates infrastructure cost and complexity by consolidating a variety of IT functions—including compute, storage, network switching, replication, and backup—onto virtualized, industry-standard x86 hardware. Princess House implemented a 2+1 OmniCube federation configuration for ultimate data protection. The company replaced five racks of legacy Dell equipment with two clustered 2U OmniCube CN-3000 systems in its primary data center. They also deployed an OmniCube CN-3000 in a remote colocation center for disaster recovery. The IT group centrally manages the distributed configuration using VMware vCenter.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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