iland, now 11:11 Systems, helps FreeState Electric Cooperative economize in the present, scaling for the future.

Customer Company Size
Mid-size Company
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- [11:11] Cloud
- [11:11] DRaaS for Zerto
Tech Stack
- VMware
- Veeam
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Applicable Industries
- Utilities
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Infrastructure Inspection
- Remote Asset Management
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
FreeState Electric Cooperative has consistently provided reliable electricity and high-quality service for over 70 years. The cooperative is the largest rural electric cooperative in eastern Kansas, with more than 15,235 member-owners. Their mission is to be an innovative, member-driven electric cooperative that exceeds their members needs for safe, reliable, and cost-effective energy services. Brent Edgecomb, IT Manager, realized they needed new compute and storage infrastructure. After extensive research, he and his team wanted to exit their on-premises datacenter for a more efficient and affordable means to serve their members.
The Challenge
FreeState Electric Cooperative was facing several challenges. They needed to reduce cost and resource requirements, and were looking for a simple cloud-based replication solution. They also required a flexible and scalable infrastructure to provide reliable and continuous service to their customers. Their legacy applications were running virtually, but running well below their latency requirements. They conducted research to find the right partner, which meant looking at numerous Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions including AWS and Azure. They focused their efforts on VMware partners since they operated in a VMware environment. Cost and resource savings were crucial to the company’s success.
The Solution
FreeState Electric Cooperative decided to use [11:11] Cloud and [11:11] DRaaS for Zerto as their solution. An IaaS solution is useful for handling unpredictable demand and steadily growing compute and storage needs. It can also simplify planning and management for disaster recovery needs. Once FreeState Electric Cooperative made the decision to look outside for their infrastructure needs, it was clear that they would need a solution to support their platform of choice. Brent also felt very strongly that they really needed a painless migration. During their investigation of migration services, Brent stated, “We discovered that AWS and Azure migrations are not as smooth.” Brent was also concerned about replicating data to a data center that was 30 miles away and therefore, working with a secure cloud provider like [11:11] made for an easy decision. While performing their cloud migration, Brent and his team wanted to dovetail the project with Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). Brent commented that “[11:11] provided complete IaaS and DRaaS solutions for our needs. Since we use Veeam products, we wanted to be able to flip a switch to enable cloud- based replication services and [11:11] was able to do that for us.”
Operational Impact
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