The customer was using HP servers, VMware, and a Hitachi SAN. Their infrastructure was primarily comprised of Cisco networking solutions, including Voice for communications, FirePOWER for security, as well as traditional routers and switches. Some of these components were housed in the customer’s two data centers, which were also devoted to backup and disaster recovery (DR).

Sentinel refreshed the customer’s data center using a hyperconverged platform centered on Dell EMC ScaleIO, Cisco UCS and Nexus core switching. This included a Data Domain backup platform leveraging Veeam with DD Boost and replication services for DR protection. We installed a hybrid cloud using IaaS from our CloudSelect® platform for multi-gigabit WAN services and redundant on-demand INTERNETaaS functionality. Sentinel also provided virtualized data center security services via Cisco ASAv with remote access through Cisco AnyConnect.

Sentinel stepped up and provided the resources needed to migrate the customer’s production environment and priority applications to the new platform. While there were minor issues moving certain elements of the infrastructure, for the most part everything went smoothly and there were no complaints from end users. The new solution has sharply increased the efficiency of the customer’s data center and related elements. The performance of the ScaleIO alone is nearly 10x faster than the applications that were running in the previous environment. Everything is built on the premise of redundancy, so in the event of a disaster or some other major data loss, there are multiple backup and recovery options readily available. The new solution has also enabled the customer to reconfigure their communications strategy, which is saving them thousands of dollars per month. Overall the customer is remarkably satisfied with the results, as they now have an ultra-high performance data center and hosted colocation services capable of extreme scale-out growth while utilizing significantly less power and space.