Stable, Reliable, & Flexible Virtual Platform Improves Marketing Company Operations

Private Cloud Solutions Bundle: A Managed IT Services Case Study

Customer Profile:

The direct mail marketing firm partners with Fortune 500 companies in packaged goods, financial services, technology, and telecommunications industries to create high-response direct marketing programs that reach target audiences during key life events, when brand loyalties and buying patterns are determined. Over the past 10 years, they have served consumer and business marketers by developing proprietary direct-response programs that include: shared mailing opportunities, custom direct marketing campaigns, custom-published magazines, proprietary mailing lists, and response analysis and reporting.

Challenges:

While the Company’s services are centered around large scale data sets and sophisticated software solutions used to customize their highly targeted output, their internal IT is primarily managed by a strong operational lead in the production department for whom IT is a secondary responsibility. This team member handles the day-to-day technical needs and issues, and now turns to Swift Systems as a partner to handle strategic network and systems management.

In 2010, the business was struggling with the upkeep and support of an aging infrastructure design, 7-8 years behind current technologies. Email was on a dedicated though underpowered server, but numerous other departments’ critical files and applications were consolidated onto shared servers that were now performing poorly and slowing down critical business operations. If there was an influx of data or heavy resource usage on these systems, servers would often crash because they were simply under-equipped to support the steadily increasing usage that accompanied the organizations’ growing business platform demands. Their application servers performed multiple roles and served so many different users and varied departmental needs, when someone wanted to upgrade or perform updates on any of the specific business systems it would often bring the entire company down for the duration of the planned (or sometimes unplanned) outages. Because the Company runs three shifts and because the critical data services and production departments both shared the same equipment, downtime was difficult to schedule and often caused significant revenue interruptions or costs, as did the inability to take advantage of new features or functions the company needed to support its’ mission.

In the past, the Company had purchased additional physical servers to accommodate increasing platform demands, moving 1 or 2 individual applications or functions onto this new server, ultimately becoming frustrated as they failed to get the most out of their hardware investments. Often, new hardware was overpowered or improperly configured for specific roles, while critical applications that needed to be isolated remained on underpowered servers. This mode of operation was both operationally inefficient and delivered a poor ROI in contrast to more modern and cost-effective virtualization technologies.

The marketing firm needed a new virtual infrastructure that would enable them to support ever increasing email volumes, and meet their “big data” I/O and data processing requirements. They needed a system with increased flexibility that would allow applications to be isolated so that software upgrades and updates could be completed on one application with little or no downtime being required for other applications. They also desired to leverage modern processing capabilities and to more effectively share and allocate critical computing resources to the applications that needed them, when they needed them without negatively impacting other critical business functions. Finally, they also required an updated and faster disaster recovery and backup plan so that critical files, applications, and entire servers could be recovered in less time.

Approach & Solution:

Swift Systems designed and implemented a small scale but scalable private cloud solution for the business leveraging modern virtualization and other technologies. Swift’s team of engineers were able to minimize project costs by laying out a physical to virtual (P2V) migration plan that replaced the aging physical servers and migrated their critical applications and functions to new isolated virtual environments. Swift updated the server operating system versions as a part of this project and the internal personnel were now able to upgrade their business specific application to the latest version improving the speed and ease of their internal workflows.

Swift engineers also repurposed some of the Company’s legacy servers into a backup server and a physically redundant backup domain controller for additional resilience of the organizations’ critical user authentication system. Even though the servers were aging, they were still capable of serving as failover equipment for staff to continue working and to facilitate independent backup services for the new virtual environment. This new backup solution also facilitates the rotation of portable storage devices offsite for an additional layer of disaster recovery protection.

The Swift team worked with the client to spread the project work over several weekends and transparently migrated the critical files and applications with little disruption to the current operational systems, very minimal effects on the staff, and no operational downtime.

Results & Benefits:

The marketing firm’s new private cloud platform is flexible and able to scale up as the Company continues to grow with little to no disruption to their ongoing business operations. The VMware virtualization environment will allow them to easily distribute roles and functions to different physical or virtual servers. At the same time consolidating physical resources into higher performing host servers saves on energy and cooling costs, increases operational and capital efficiencies, and provides the necessary system performance for their critical business processes. The Company now also has a solid business continuity plan in place to protect company assets and investments ensuring a quick, seamless recovery path in the case of an equipment failure. Swift Systems continues to provide regular onsite and remote services providing preventative maintenance and a proprietary blend of manual and automated checks on the Company’s systems and network elements ensuring that all continue to run reliably and at peak performance.

About Swift Systems:

Swift Systems serves regional businesses as a provider of IT engineering and consulting services, colocation, and other cloud-based services from two Swift Systems owned and managed data centers. Our dynamic infrastructure services and data management solutions help growing organizations solve their business challenges and successfully leverage their IT investments. We define flexible architecture for organizations that allow them to grow their businesses knowing that their network and critical storage and computing platforms can easily and cost effectively scale to meet their ever expanding needs. Swift Systems – a certified veteran owned small business and leading managed information technology (IT) solutions provider that delivers the highest level of technology based IT services to businesses, government agencies, and institutions throughout Maryland, the District of Columbia, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia.

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