Penobscot Community Health Care (PCHC), the largest and most comprehensive federally qualified health center in Maine, was facing challenges with its aging IT infrastructure. The existing infrastructure, a mix of HP servers and Dell Compellent storage arrays, was running out of capacity and becoming increasingly costly and risky to maintain. Applications and data were only backed up locally, so equipment failures or catastrophes had the potential to disrupt critical IT services for an extended period of time. With elements of the data center approaching end-of-life, Jason Lewis, Director of IT Infrastructure and Security for PCHC, decided the time was right for a technology refresh.

Rhodix IT Services, a small business located in the Netherlands, was facing challenges due to the management of multiple solutions and vendors. This was particularly burdensome during a data center migration or consolidation initiative. The company was in need of a solution that could streamline their IT infrastructure and reduce the complexity of managing multiple vendors.

The iFish Group was in the process of a capacity purchase/upgrade of their existing infrastructure which led to an overall platform review. Prior to deploying HPE SimpliVity Hyperconverged Infrastructure, they found the management of multiple solutions and vendors to be manageable, but not ideal. The company was looking for a solution that could simplify their infrastructure and improve performance.

Surrey Place Centre, a specialized clinical services provider for individuals living with developmental disabilities, autism spectrum disorder and those with visual impairments, was operating with a fractured IT environment. The combination of HP and Dell servers and Dell storage arrays was costly and complicated to administer and maintain. The organization relied on an outdated tape-based backup solution for offsite disaster recovery. Catastrophes had the potential to disrupt critical business applications for days or even weeks while systems were recovered.

The municipality of Båstad in Sweden was facing a challenge with its outdated IT infrastructure. The town's IT services were provided by a small team of eight, and the infrastructure was based on a mix of HP ProLiant servers and HP EVA and IBM Storwize v7000 SAN storage systems, all deployed in a single data center. This setup was vulnerable to disruptions in the event of power outages or major catastrophes such as floods or fires. The town decided to take advantage of a government disaster preparedness initiative to upgrade its aging IT systems and ensure business continuity and disaster recovery for its critical IT services.

Technisch Handelsbureau Rensa, a medium-sized enterprise in the wholesale distribution industry, was facing challenges with their existing infrastructure. They had purchased HPE SimpliVity Hyperconverged Infrastructure as a result of a capacity purchase/upgrade of existing infrastructure that led to an overall platform review. Prior to deploying HPE SimpliVity Hyperconverged Infrastructure, the company found the management of multiple solutions and vendors to be manageable, but not ideal. They were looking for a solution that could consolidate their data center and modernize their infrastructure.

Wausau Coated Products, a mid-sized manufacturing firm, was looking to simplify its IT infrastructure while maintaining 24×7 uptime requirements. The company needed to improve its disaster recovery, business continuity, and backup capabilities, and reduce operational costs. The IT environment at Wausau is sophisticated, with the team custom writing all of their ERP and accounting software in-house. Given the ERP system's role in running the operations of the business, downtime could not be tolerated. The company was also looking for a solution that was simple to manage, enabled significant operational cost savings, scaled in simple, low-cost increments, maintained high performance under system load, enabled rapid clones, and provided 24/7 support.

Dairylea Cooperative was facing challenges with their existing IT infrastructure. They were burdened with the management of multiple solutions and vendors, which was proving to be a significant burden. They were in need of a backup replacement and disaster recovery capabilities. The company was looking for a solution that could consolidate their data center, modernize their infrastructure, support Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), run production applications, support test/dev and QA, and facilitate data migration.

Francis Drilling Fluids, Ltd. (FDF) had been using an IBM BladeCenter infrastructure, IBM SAN storage, DLT tape solutions, and Veeam for VM backup protection. Over time, the company saw more demand for new applications and experienced significant growth in VM servers, which put significant strain on the existing legacy infrastructure and the small IT team. The added complexity from the VM server 'sprawl' coupled with initiatives to improve data protection, DR, and co-location hosting, the company's IT department decided to take a closer look at converged infrastructure. The company works hard to ensure alignment between business strategy and IT strategy, according to Steve Schaaf, Chief Information Officer for FDF. However, with a small IT shop, executing on that vision can be challenging.

Francis Drilling Fluids, a medium-sized enterprise in the transportation services industry, was facing challenges with their existing IT infrastructure. They had a mandate to implement disaster recovery (DR) and improve their backup and recovery systems. However, they found the management of multiple solutions and vendors to be manageable, but not ideal. This led them to seek a more streamlined and efficient solution.

iON Solutions, a managed service provider, was facing challenges with its aging IT infrastructure. The company's infrastructure included eight legacy servers and a Dell EqualLogic SAN, along with two backup SANs running Veeam Backup and Replication. The main driver for the project was infrastructure modernization, but the company also needed to improve its backup and disaster recovery capabilities. The company's customers rely on it to provide critical IT services, so availability, flexibility, and data protection are paramount in its IT infrastructure. The company pledges to minimize risk, drive cost savings, improve security, and to maximize efficiency for greener computing in commercial organizations and in government. Therefore, when it came time for a server refresh, President Derek Fowler decided to cast a wider net and consider new technologies for the company's aging infrastructure.

SwiftecIT, a mid-sized Boston Area IT services provider, was facing challenges with its legacy IT infrastructure. The company was experiencing growth and needed to manage more customers, an increasing number of internal applications, and more hosting servers for its nascent cloud services. The legacy infrastructure was no longer able to provide the speed, flexibility, backup, high availability, and data recovery functionality that the company and its clients required. SwiftecIT needed a solution that would lower total cost of ownership, scale incrementally as the business grows, and be simple to use.

SwiftecIT, a small business in the computer services industry, was facing challenges with their existing IT infrastructure. They had a mandate to implement disaster recovery (DR) and improve backup/recovery. However, they found the management of multiple solutions and vendors to be manageable, but not ideal. The company was looking for a solution that could consolidate their data center, modernize their infrastructure, support Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), and handle production applications, test/dev, and QA.

Coughlan Companies was in the process of a capacity purchase and upgrade of their existing infrastructure, which led to an overall platform review. Prior to deploying HPE SimpliVity Hyperconverged Infrastructure, they found the management of multiple solutions and vendors to be manageable, but not ideal. The company was looking for a solution that could simplify their IT infrastructure and improve performance.

NewPage, a leading paper manufacturer in North America, was facing a high-cost, outdated legacy infrastructure. The company was maintaining an impressive 95% virtualized infrastructure, but the rigid “silos” of legacy compute servers and expensive, complex SAN-based storage were inhibiting the team’s ability to scale to meet business needs. The aging and underperforming 50TB EVA8000, 46TB EVA4400, and 150TB VNX5500 were also due for a refresh. The virtualized environment was becoming increasingly difficult to scale and manage, resulting in diminished productivity. The team of ten was spread thin managing their 166 RU legacy systems. The legacy infrastructure’s physical requirements continued to increase, a 100% virtualized infrastructure seemed increasingly unlikely.

NewPage Corporation was facing challenges due to the management of multiple solutions and vendors, which was manageable but not ideal. They were looking for a solution as part of a data center migration or consolidation initiative. The company was in need of a solution that could help them avoid managing multiple vendors and the associated multiple maintenance cost streams. They were also looking to consolidate their data center footprint and save on electricity and air conditioning.

Central One Federal Credit Union was facing challenges with their existing infrastructure. They were in the process of a capacity purchase and upgrade which led to an overall platform review. The management of multiple solutions and vendors was proving to be a significant burden for the company. They needed a solution that could consolidate their data center, modernize their infrastructure, and support their Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), production applications, and test/dev and QA processes.

Abba Technologies purchased HPE SimpliVity Hyperconverged Infrastructure as a result of a data center migration or consolidation initiative. Prior to deploying HPE SimpliVity Hyperconverged Infrastructure, they found the management of multiple solutions and vendors to be a burden.

The IT department for the City of Arvada needed to update its Computer Aided Dispatch and Record Management System (CAD/RMS), a critical application that drives dispatching and logging for the emergency 911 services and police employees working around the city. The existing system was running on Cisco Blade servers connected to a Dell Compellent SAN, and this configuration was becoming too expensive to augment and maintain effectively. The department looked for an affordable, efficient, reliable, and easily manageable solution that would enable the IT staff to maintain the high-end levels of service expected by the city staff. They also needed to improve their disaster recovery capabilities.

The Credit and Investment Ombudsman (CIO) was experiencing growth challenges within its IT. The organization’s new levels of growth required a new data platform for the next chapter in the organization’s life. The legacy IT infrastructure was designed for the early stages of the organization’s operation. CIO was running all their applications on physical servers, and they had not invested in virtualization. Their legacy infrastructure impaired CIO’s ability to expand and adapt to new business growth. It was time to make a change. CIO was challenged by managing a cluttered data center of aging hardware and software. Their physical environment consisted of general purpose Dell servers with built-in storage. The physical stack consumed multiple racks in their data center. The complex infrastructure ran Microsoft Small Business Server and other database servers. The servers were dedicated to running specific applications such as WebApp, Database, email messaging, accounting and various line of business applications.

The University of Namibia (UNAM) was looking to refresh their entire legacy infrastructure and simplify the management and maintenance of their systems. They were facing challenges with data center consolidation, infrastructure modernization, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), supporting Tier-1 applications, and virtualizing their physical infrastructure. They approached Salt Essential IT, a value-added reseller of SimpliVity, for advice on available VDI solutions. After several meetings and a Proof of Concept (POC) on Pivot3, a tender was offered for Pivot3. However, SimpliVity's OmniCube had become available and was presented as a potential solution.

Nuh Cement, a global producer and supplier of cement, ready-mixed concrete, and building products, was facing challenges with its legacy IT systems. The systems were becoming increasingly inefficient, risky, and expensive. The manufacturer’s siloed IT infrastructure included legacy servers and stand-alone storage systems—all deployed in a single data center. The company’s IT department relied on a variety of data backup and recovery tools for data protection. Disasters or hardware failures had the potential to impair critical IT services and disrupt business; restoring applications could take hours or even days using the legacy data protection solutions. Dissatisfied with the performance, reliability, and economics of its aging information systems, Nuh’s IT team launched a business transformation program to upgrade the company’s IT infrastructure.

Salt Essential IT, a small business in the computer services industry based in Namibia, was facing challenges with their existing infrastructure. They had to manage multiple solutions and vendors, which was manageable but not ideal. This led to a capacity purchase and upgrade of their existing infrastructure, which in turn led to an overall platform review. The company was looking for a solution that could consolidate their data center, modernize their infrastructure, and support their production applications, test/dev and QA, and data migration.

One Source Networks (OSN) was developing multiple new services to meet the evolving needs of its global enterprise customers. When tasked with rolling out the company’s new Cloud Lync Enterprise offering, they decided to broaden their scope beyond traditional servers, SAN and storage architectures. The new infrastructure had to be world-class to support the robust Cloud Lync Enterprise service, while delivering operational improvements. OSN’s Cloud Lync Enterprise is a fully-managed, dedicated offering that provides organizations with the feature functionality and security of a premises-based Lync environment, with the global scale and cost efficiency of a hosted service.

Saddleback Valley Unified School District (SVUSD) was facing a 25 to 35 percent annual storage growth rate, which required constant management of its 50TB iSCSI SAN through costly annual expansion. The school district had approximately 100 VMs managing a myriad of heavyweight, mission-critical applications such as collaboration software, Web servers, multiple SQL databases, and a massive, 3,000-user Microsoft Exchange Server. Each year, Rich Dear, Systems Manager at SVUSD, had to expand the school district’s iSCSI SAN to accommodate application performance and user data growth. In addition, SVUSD’s server infrastructure was in need of an upgrade. The IT team was also looking to reduce its data center footprint along with the associated energy costs and management overhead.

Syntrophos, a Shared Service Center founded by four cities in the Netherlands, provides high quality ICT, GEO-information, and consulting services to over 120,000 citizens, as well as seven smaller governmental agencies. The company employs over 1400 staff and has a dedicated IT team of eleven focused on running and maintaining its mission-critical applications. With applications such as Oracle 11g; Microsoft SQL Server, DFS, and IIS; Horizon Workspace; CheckPoint Firewall; and Apache Webserver in its physical data centers, end user access to these critical services is a key priority. However, with plans to migrate all virtual machines and consolidate the four cities’ data centers by early 2015, Syntrophos faced major consolidation challenges and needed a solution that could virtualize and migrate the entire IT environment while supporting its Tier-1 applications.

Westmoreland Intermediate Unit (WIU), a regional educational service agency in Pennsylvania, was faced with a vexing problem. Their legacy IT environment could no longer handle their growing VMs, and were quickly running out of capacity for optimal operations and data protection. The WIU had two Promise Arrays, totaling 4TB of storage, attached to two Intel Modular Server chassis, each containing 14 internal disks with 6TB of internal storage. Their entire environment had about 12TB worth of storage, but the WIU quickly discovered that it was no longer sufficient. The decreasing capacity was growing to be more than an initial annoyance and had the predicted consequence of forcing them to reduce the number of backups in order to conserve their lessening storage capacity. Their key mission-critical application, a 2TB Microsoft Exchange server supplying over 3000 mailboxes to users in the numerous school districts, were using Veeam backups to send data to the TwinStrata CloudArray with Amazon S3. While the WIU was backing up their applications daily with five restore points, some larger VMs, such as Exchange, could undergo only one restore point due to capacity restraints. The WIU also faced additional frustrations with extremely long backup times of up to eight hours using Veeam, and then only being able to retain those backups for a week. When backing up to cloud, the process took even longer, usually upwards of 48 hours to migrate everything.

The Worcester County Sheriff’s Office had been operating on an outdated DIY IT infrastructure. The IT team was running all of its operations on a 16-server, legacy HP infrastructure with a complex, expensive SAN and storage. The small team in IT was forced to cope with a large data center footprint that was complex to scale and manage and had no automated backup and DR capability whatsoever. In addition to dealing with the outdated, cumbersome legacy infrastructure, the IT team was operating under the constant threat of major data loss. With no service level agreements implemented for RPOs and RTOs within its infrastructure, the office’s mission critical applications were always at risk.

Altrecht, a leading Dutch mental healthcare provider, was facing challenges with its legacy IT environment—a mix of Dell servers and EMC Clariion storage systems—which was running out of capacity and approaching end-of-life. The provider was seeking innovative ways to reduce IT expenses in light of shrinking budgets and growing government regulations. They needed a solution that would ensure high performance and resiliency for their critical applications, while significantly reducing equipment and operations expenses.

The IT team at the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE) was in search of a Storage Area Network (SAN) solution that would meet their needs for storage consolidation, efficient tier-1 backups, and disaster recovery. This need became especially clear when the AUPE’s main building was flooded during an icy Alberta winter, causing significant damage to their data center. The team spent over 18 months meeting with various vendors and suppliers and conducting audits of AUPE’s requirements. They eventually realized that a SAN purchase alone would not meet all of AUPE’s needs. In addition to storage consolidation, they needed a solution that could handle their backup, replication, and remote office management challenges. They were also facing servers and computers that needed to be refreshed and found it difficult to predict growth and expand storage.