Business Challenge:
A multi-billion dollar company was looking to save money by moving out of a hosted data center environment and building its own in-house private cloud data centers. The major goal was to ensure that the design, implementation and support of this new data center was robust, scalable, secure and flexible enough to handle the entire current and future operations of the company.
A quick highlight of other important requirements:
- Gap Analysis of its entire current infrastructure to understand current state and future goals.
- Come up with a plan and design to migrate to the new data center without any downtime.
- Multiple data centers across different geographical regions for load-balancing and redundancy purposes.
- Migrate locations from their previous WAN connections (T1, T3, etc) to the new MPLS connection.
- Meet deadline to enable customer to cancel previous hosting contracts on time to start realizing the cost savings.
- Project Planning was key to a successful migration.
Our Data Center Services Solution:
VeeMost Data Center Consulting Services team was engaged to perform a GAP analysis.
- We worked together with the internal IT staff of the company to come up with data center design and plan of action.
- Procured the necessary equipment and acted as a liaison between the customer and other vendors.
- Deployed all hardware, software and technologies as required in our design document.
- Successfully migrated the customer’s network services, and data over to the new data center without any downtime.
Technical Details of our Data Center Design:
Using Cisco’s line of products, specifically the UCS computing platform, Nexus, Catalyst Switches and ISR products, we built out different modules of the network.
Technologies implemented include, but were not limited to the following:
- Cisco UCS server platform used as the unified computing platform. It also converges Ethernet and storage in one.
- Cisco Nexus 2000, Next 5000, Nexus 7000 used as access, distribution and core layer switches for the server edge.
- Cisco 3850 switches used as access switches because of its wireless controller capabilities.
- An OTV design to connect the different geographically dispersed data centers together for the purpose of extending the server LAN for technologies such as vMotion and data replication, etc. This allowed the servers, data, and services to be available at all the data centers all the time so that failure of one data center component does not affect production.
- We used LISP technology used to control and ensure efficient inbound routing. (When multiple data centers have the same IP subnet, a way is needed to ensure the right path to the servers is taken at all times.)
- MPLS used to connect remote office locations to the datacenters
- DMVPN used as the secondary connection from the remote locations to the datacenters via the internet.
- Multi-homing of the internet connections from the different data centers so that loss of one data center’s internet connection does not cause a service outage for the company.
Result:
- We met the targeted deadline. The company was able to cancel their previous hosting agreement on time to start realizing savings.
- Robust Data Center Design: The design implemented was scalable and robust enough to handle business operations and ensure fast and secure access to services and information.
- Confidence in Technology Restored: Technology is now seen as a tool not only to increase productivity, but also impacted the company’s bottom line.
- Data Center Savings: The company saved over $45million dollars in fees being paid to their data center Hosting provider. Now they have brought everything in-house.
Our model is to assess, recommend, design, plan, implement and train customer’s engineers to manage the new technology. However, many customers often retain our services to augment their IT staff and to provide expert technology services. Due to the success of the project, the company retained VeeMost for all their IT needs .
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