Agilis Networks was in need of a new storage system for its customer-facing services. The company required a resilient, high-availability platform to support its business model, which allows customers to purchase cycles up to the virtual machines (VMs). The existing infrastructure was not meeting the demands for high availability and efficient management, prompting the search for a more robust solution. Additionally, Agilis Networks was concerned about the cost of power and the physical footprint of the new solution, which were critical factors in their decision-making process.

The Akron School District was relying on a three-tier VMware virtualization environment with separate storage, network, and servers. It was originally designed as an active-failover environment with two data centers, but had turned into an active-active environment due to budget constraints. Akron Public Schools is using Munis financial software from Tyler Technologies, a compute-intensive application with a large MS SQL backend and IIS front end.

ADD was reliant on a traditional three-layer architecture consisting of server, storage, and networking, which was complex and time-consuming to maintain. The IT team was spending a significant amount of time on system maintenance, and upgrades were costly and had to be performed after business hours to avoid downtime. Additionally, the company ran numerous applications with various components, and as part of a banking group, security was a critical concern. The existing infrastructure was proving too much for the small IT team to manage effectively.

Automotive Data Solutions Inc. (ADS) faced significant challenges with their existing IT infrastructure. The licensing costs for the VMware vSphere hypervisor were prohibitively high, and the management of the virtual environment was overly complex. ADS had opened its first data center three years ago, utilizing Dell iSCSI SAN and NAS storage systems for backups. However, as the company virtualized its IT environment using VMware vSphere 5.5, it became apparent that the existing storage platform was not well-suited to the virtual environment. This led Marcello Gentile, the director of systems administration, and his team to search for a new storage platform that could better support their needs. The complexity of the legacy virtualization environment and the high costs associated with it were major pain points that needed addressing.

BART completed a $40 million business transformation project in 2012, modernizing all of its finance, HR, and maintenance systems using traditional storage systems and HP servers. However, the existing infrastructure was becoming increasingly difficult to manage and scale, especially as BART sought to refresh its BART police application infrastructure and add a new disaster recovery location. The organization needed a new private cloud environment that was easy to manage and scale, and could support its enterprise applications more efficiently. Additionally, BART faced challenges with its existing EMC VNX system, which experienced a catastrophic system failure in 2015, highlighting the need for a more reliable and robust infrastructure solution.

Beedie Development Group (BDG) faced significant challenges with its existing IT infrastructure, which was fully virtualized but relied on a mix of IBM servers and an aging EMC SAN. The complexity of the existing SAN and server infrastructure made it difficult to configure, manage, and scale the environment effectively. This situation was further complicated by the need to support multiple, mixed workloads and the requirement for a robust disaster recovery solution. The IT team, led by Mark Wessel, was tasked with finding a more efficient and scalable solution to address these challenges. In 2014, BDG began the search for a better storage and server platform, with the goal of simplifying management, improving performance, and ensuring reliable disaster recovery capabilities.

Black Hills Energy faced stability and manageability challenges with their existing storage and hypervisor environment. The company had deployed virtual desktops for all internal users in 2011 using Citrix XenDesktop and traditional servers and SAN storage systems. As the infrastructure aged, it became necessary to refresh the system to ensure continued efficiency and reliability. The IT team at Black Hills Energy decided to upgrade to Nutanix due to its strong reputation and the need for a more stable and manageable solution. The existing environment was experiencing instability and unplanned outages, which prompted the decision to move to a more robust infrastructure.

The Blue Springs School District faced significant challenges with its distributed IT environment, which consisted of separate data centers at each school location. The district was managing a mix of Dell servers, with two domain controllers and data storage for staff and students in each building. This setup required a lot of time and resources to maintain and update, consuming a significant amount of man-hours. Additionally, the cost of replacing aging servers and the energy consumption of running a data center in each building were not efficient. The district lacked a centralized IT team, leading to inconsistent policies and procedures across locations. The goal was to consolidate all servers into one centralized data center to ease IT management, cut costs, and improve performance for end users.

Calgary Catholic School District (CCSD) faced challenges with their existing IT infrastructure, which relied on HP blades for compute and NetApp FAS systems for storage. The environment was virtualized using vSphere 5.5, with over 270 virtual machines for production, development, and test workloads. Despite covering a large geographical area, only two IT team members managed all data center operations. In 2010, a one-time cash infusion from the Alberta government allowed CCSD to modernize their data center with blade architectures, SANs, and VMware. However, they soon realized the need to further modernize their environment to keep up with technological advancements.

Cal OES faced challenges in virtualizing operations across its numerous small and large remote offices. The existing infrastructure, which included blade servers and network-attached storage, was too large, power-consuming, and noisy for smaller offices. Additionally, there was pressure from the state CIO to avoid further datacenter buildouts. The agency needed a solution that could support its applications, particularly its 4-terabyte SQL enterprise deployment, while reducing the datacenter footprint.

Cardinal Innovations was using a traditional three-tier IT architecture for its healthcare applications and services, which was complex and difficult to manage. The infrastructure was more like five tiers, involving multiple products such as Cisco Nexus Unified Fabric, Cisco UCS servers, EMC VNX 5400 storage systems, and VMware’s ESX hypervisor. Managing these components was time-consuming, and scaling was challenging due to the 'tipping points' of each component. The IT team faced difficulties in keeping track of different product versions and ensuring solution compatibility, which led to issues in the Citrix environment. Additionally, a merger with another managed care organization required Cardinal Innovations to integrate 215 new employees quickly, prompting the need for a more efficient and scalable IT solution.

Keith Laycock and Simrat Sekhon, network systems engineers for the City of Redmond, faced the challenge of managing a complex and aging IT infrastructure. The existing setup included HPE servers, VMware for virtualization, Brocade switches for SAN traffic, and NetApp storage, which was cumbersome to maintain. The high maintenance costs of NetApp systems, especially post-warranty, and the inefficiencies of the third NetApp upgrade prompted the need for a more innovative and efficient IT solution. The City required a product that could save time while providing the high performance and reliability necessary for running its applications and services.

The City of Westfield faced the challenge of an aging IT infrastructure that was reaching end-of-life. Their existing HP EVA storage C7000 enclosure with six blade servers and VMware was due for a refresh. The city needed a more efficient and cost-effective solution to support its IT services, which included public safety departments and schools. The IT department was responsible for 33 remote sites, 2,500 end users, and 5,800 students, making it crucial to find a reliable and scalable solution. Additionally, the city was looking to reduce operational costs, improve application performance, and enable seamless upgrades without disrupting services.

At the time Tyson Mock joined Cochise County as IT Director, his team faced the challenge of developing a plan to replace approximately 50 aging physical servers, many of which were more than 10 years old. The servers hosted all of the county’s critical applications. Replacing them with new physical servers wasn’t even a consideration. “I knew we needed to capitalize on virtualization. We wanted to deploy, cost-effectively, a new virtualized environment that would let us retire the old physical servers and move those critical applications into a stable, high performing, and easy to administer environment,” said Mock. Past experience with high cost and difficult to manage Fibre Channel SANs as well as mediocre performing iSCSI SANs lead Mock to pursue an alternative way to virtualize his environment. Mock decided to start with a clean slate. “I was looking specifically for non-traditional virtualization options that would lower costs, simplify management and not sacrifice performance or stability,” he said.

San Mateo County faced challenges with its aging storage and server infrastructure, which was no longer adequate for their IT requirements. The existing IT platform lacked scalability and was difficult to manage, hindering the county's ability to focus on strategic and customer-facing projects. As a government agency, they did not have the budget to refresh their infrastructure annually, necessitating a solution that could address current challenges and enable easy scalability for future growth. The county's IT environment consisted of a mix of infrastructure solutions designed for specific projects, making it difficult to scale up or out to support new projects and solutions.

Doctors’ Center Hospitals faced significant IT challenges due to their reliance on an EMC direct-attached storage (DAS) solution. The existing infrastructure was becoming inadequate as the hospital network expanded, necessitating a centralized data center operation to simplify management for their small IT team. The addition of new applications to remote hospitals required increased bandwidth, which was costly in Puerto Rico, with monthly expenses exceeding $7,000. Despite increasing bandwidth from 20 MB to 50 MB, application performance, particularly for the MEDITECH EHR system, did not improve. The hospital needed a powerful, cost-effective storage solution to enhance application performance and reduce operational costs.

Edmonds Community College faced challenges with their existing HPE blade server infrastructure, which was nearing the end of support. The complexity of managing the HPE environment was a significant issue, as it required meticulous tracking of firmware updates and compatibility. The IT team was spending excessive time on maintenance, which was not sustainable. Additionally, the college was experiencing reliability issues with their HPE SAN systems, with frequent hard drive failures. The need for a more reliable and easier-to-manage solution was evident, prompting the search for a new infrastructure.

Empire Life was relying on an aging mainframe environment for its critical financial data and daily investment transactions. The equipment and support were very expensive, and the annual maintenance contracts were high. The company needed a more cost-effective solution that could provide enough performance for its mission-critical applications and enable the launch of new solutions, including hybrid cloud. The mainframe environment included a large SAN backend and standard x86 servers, which were not meeting the company's needs for cost efficiency and performance.

Excelitas faced challenges with delivering new environments quickly due to budget constraints and the need to over-provision hardware for future growth. The company had a complex and time-consuming IT environment due to a mix of dissimilar hardware from various acquisitions. This complexity made it difficult to manage and scale their infrastructure efficiently. The existing 3-tier storage and server environment was not meeting their needs for fast-growing mission-critical applications.

GA Telesis faced significant challenges as it expanded through strategic acquisitions, which increased IT demands and complexities. The company needed to integrate a variety of legacy systems into its existing infrastructure, which was due for an upgrade. The existing EMC storage appliances were reaching the end of their life, and maintenance costs were escalating. System management was also a challenge, as managing storage had become a full-time job, diverting resources from the company's core processes. GA Telesis needed a solution that would simplify management, reduce the data center footprint, and lower Oracle licensing costs.

Hallmark Business Connections faced the challenge of deploying a new data analytics application and migrating their entire datacenter to a hyperconverged infrastructure over a three-year roadmap. The company needed a scalable platform for their data analytics application, as well as a solution to poor build performance. Additionally, they aimed to migrate development and production workloads from a traditional 3-tier infrastructure to a next-generation hyperconverged datacenter. The infrastructure team was interested in hyperconvergence as a potential platform for VDI and saw it as an opportunity to demonstrate the benefits of hyperconvergence to senior management.

The Harris County District Attorney’s Office faced significant IT challenges with its existing infrastructure. The legacy system consisted of individual rack-mounted servers connected to a SAN, managed with VMware vSphere. This setup occupied over one and a half racks in their datacenter, and while performance was adequate, provisioning new VMs was a major challenge. The office had aggressive plans to implement Citrix XenApp, XenDesktop, and Microsoft Lync, as well as upgrade to Microsoft Exchange 2016, but the existing storage arrays were insufficient to meet these goals. The IT team began searching for a new storage platform in 2015, considering both Nutanix hyperconverged systems and a traditional three-tier architecture. The latter involved servers, an all-flash array solution, and high-capacity deep storage, but the costs and manageability issues made Nutanix the more attractive option.

The Hastings & Prince Edward Counties Health Unit faced significant challenges with their existing server and storage systems, which were inadequate for their virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) needs. The daily boot storms and antivirus scans created a massive surge in I/O demand, slowing down both desktop and server applications. The IT team wanted to expand the number of virtual desktops but was hindered by performance limitations. Additionally, the existing blade servers and SAN had just come out of warranty, and the team was preparing for a move to a new datacenter. The Health Unit needed a new solution that offered greater performance, capacity, and easier management, with enterprise-class fault tolerance and uptime.

Houston Healthcare faced significant challenges with its existing PC-based infrastructure, which was inefficient and time-consuming for physicians. The average login time for personal computers ranged from 45 seconds to 1.5 minutes, causing physicians to spend approximately 20 minutes each day just logging in and out of machines. This inefficiency was compounded by the inability to use newly purchased iOS devices during the transition to the Meditech EMR system, creating additional problems. The healthcare provider had previously attempted to implement VDI in 2008 but faced numerous issues, leading to the removal of the system. To successfully deploy a new VDI solution, Houston Healthcare needed a better storage, server, and networking infrastructure.