Case Study
Bay Area Government Contractor
Number of employees:  >400

Project; Small IT staff to support a large user base over a global regional area. To minimize back-end workload, and eliminate failures due to hardware, we performed a workload analysis to determine a proper solution that would have low TCO, high flexibility ad scalability.

The business does special projects and uses both windows and linux based solutions (Oracle (on linux), MSSQL, IIS, Primevera and proprietary accounting systems).

Based on the information and customer preferences, a Bladecenter system was chosen, using a DS4700 SAN. The system was setup to boot esx from the SAN, and the existing workloads were migrated onto the blades. (they were able to host 5-10 servers per blade, with some blades dedicated to database servers). The ESX server where clustered, allowing them to have a fail-over in the event of a Blade server  failure.

A alternate site was designed and is being used to replicate the virtual workloads to a remote data-center using DoubleTake and Acronis. Direct SAN replication was considered, but determined to not be cost effective based on the Business process RPO/RTO’s.