Case Study: Xigent Helps Modernize Another Data Center.

Overview


The Client is a century-old British firm who, in its early days, manufactured and installed the necessary equipment for converting the UK’s street lighting from gas to electric. Since then, they’ve expanded their offerings and capabilities substantially – all the while retaining their core focus in the production of countermeasures, sensors and energetics. The Client has very few IT staff in their U.S. operations, and has traditionally maintained a contract with a value-added re-seller (VAR) to provide guidance on sourcing the right technology solutions to run their business. Xigent was brought into focus by one of our technology solutions partners who had a pre-existing engagement with The Client.

 

Objective


The Client sought a more robust datacenter solution to provide compute, storage and disaster recovery capabilities in supporting their roll-out of Microsoft Dynamics 365, a line of leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) software apps. The solution needed to be pre-built and accommodate three years’ worth of growth as The Client scaled out their use of Dynamics out to full production at their six physical U.S. sites located in Illinois, South Dakota, Florida, Virginia, 

  Microsoft Dynamics

Tennessee and North Carolina. This scale-out will be a key driver for success in the coming decade. Additionally, due to the high security and control requirements that come with holding government contracts, the Client required this be a premises-based deployment. Last of all, adding to the complexity and the uniqueness of The Client’s requirements was the need to have both virtual and physical servers, as they needed to operate Hyper-V, Microsoft’s native hypervisor, for Dynamics, and its existing VMWare solution for the remainder of its environment.

 

Solution


Due to their relatively small physical IT footprint on site at their U.S. locations, the client has traditionally maintained a contract with their VAR partner to provide guidance on sourcing the right technology solutions to drive business objectives and complete complex IT projects. After being presented with a number of choices, the Client chose the solution that consisted of the following elements:

• Cisco UCS Blade and C Series Servers for compute,

• Cisco Nexus 9000 and 3000 Series switches,

• NetApp All-Flash for primary storage,

• Cohesity for data backup and disaster recovery (Cross-hypervisor recovery between Hyper-V and VMWare).

Could you and your company be our next success story? Contact us today and leave us a note – a subject matter expert will reach out to you and help you find out!