PROVIDED MANAGED SERVICES AND COLOCATION FOR LARGE ILLINOIS-BASED CHARTER SCHOOL DISTRICT
“Storcom is everything we could have dreamed of in an information technology service provider.” – CIO of a large Illinois-based charter school district.
A. BUSINESS CHALLENGES
This organization had a limited IT staff and needed a solution that was easy to use, manage, and scalable to provide maximum availability. Initially, Storcom started providing Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service for this school district in our T3 data center in the Western suburbs of Chicago. As our relationship grew, Storcom learned more about the organization. This client turned to us for our expertise in designing a new IT solution. Storcom discussed the option of a hyper-converged hardware and software solution as their infrastructure required updates and they needed to purchase new hardware.
B. STORCOM’S SOLUTION
Storcom deployed a hyper-converged infrastructure solution in their production data center that provided the necessary storage and compute resources to run this client’s operations. Our client leveraged Storcom’s Lombard data center as a disaster recovery site in phase one of this project. The second phase was to purchase additional equipment replace the infrastructure in Lombard and switch production to Storcom’s Lombard data center so that DR was not hosted in the Chicago data center.
C. RESULTS
After deploying the new solution and migrating production workloads, this client now has a stronger-than-ever IT presence with maximum uptime and leveraging the built-in DR/BC capabilities of the hyperconverged solution that Storcom helped them select. Our client has a real DR/BC solution that allows for very low RPO and RTO operations in the event of an outage. They now also leverage OSPF on VPLS mesh and can even use the multiple egress points of either data center to ensure that their facility can get on the Internet in the event one of their data centers loses Internet access.
D. TOOLS UTILIZED
- VMware vSphere
- HPE SimpliVity hyperconverged solution
- Cisco switching
