Case Studies
True tales of customer success with Sentinel
Refrigeration Company Gets A Cool Data Center Upgrade
Environment
The customer had a small data center in need of significant expansion, with a number of aging infrastructure components to support their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Computer Aided Design (CAD) services. This included aging NAS storage, an older network with limited core capabilities, and minimal disaster protection services.
Challenge
The customer was required to upgrade their ERP solution in order to support international expansion and business automation. This included building a new data center platform for side-by-side installation and migration. Scalability was essential, as the solution would have to handle the customer’s immediate needs, plans for growth, as well as their global M&A strategies. They wanted to ensure the continued development cycles vital to the ERP solution were accounted for, and improve their test/dev and quality assurance (QA) processes to optimize productivity.
The customer also wanted to address issues with local resilience and disaster recovery services. Their reliance on system availability across international time zones meant that continual uptime was extremely important. With limited IT resources available to maintain such a robust solution, the customer needed an outside provider with advanced support capabilities and disaster recovery in the cloud to assist their facilities 24x7x365.
The customer was working on a tight deadline and it became critical that the new infrastructure be deployed and ready to use on very short notice. Unfortunately, hardware shortages from two manufacturers affected the availability of key switching and storage infrastructure components, creating a significant delay that threatened to push the project well beyond the established time frame.
Solution
Sentinel designed and deployed an enterprise-class, scalable all flash Solid State Drive (SSD) for storage, as well as an Oracle-based IFS ERP platform with DevOps to support the customer’s aggressive plans for expansion. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaas) was also installed for data protection and runbook automation between the premise and CloudSelect® infrastructure elements.
In order to overcome the hardware shortages, Sentinel searched our warehouse and spare inventory to create an interim solution and began the integration project. The Sentinel team was able to deploy spare switching infrastructure to provide network connectivity, and used recently decommissioned storage and compute resources from one of our redundant corporate data centers.
Results
Sentinel completed the interim ERP platform migration a week ahead of the scheduled deadline, exceeding the customer's expectations. Once all the hardware for the originally intended solution arrived, Sentinel seamlessly transitioned the customer into the long-term, enterprise-class solution without disruption. The customer is now running their ERP platform and Tier 1 applications on new data center hardware, with secure backup and disaster recovery via Sentinel's CloudSelect®. They have also added Sentinel's Managed Services to ensure regular maintenance and support of their platform and hardware by our highly trained and certified engineers.