Miller Construction
When Miller Construction, a 35 year old preeminent firm, wanted to reduce costs, increase capacity, and go green with their datacenter they decided to virtualize their server infrastructure with VMWare and Compellent technology solutions, and they selected Conquest to design, deploy, test and support their virtualized datacenter.
“Conquest engineered a scalable, redundant virtual infrastructure to consolidate our datacenter. Their engineers were professionals and experts, and they executed the project on time and on budget as promised. Conquest even provides support for my virtual datacenter when my support team needs assistance. I would highly recommend Conquest to any colleague that is undertaking a server consolidation project.”
Whitney Rawls, IT Manager, Miller Construction
Conquest met with Rawls, and based on Miller Constructions business requirements designed an integrated datacenter virtualization solution. Conquest also delivered a solid roadmap that would get Miller’s infrastructure virtualized in a matter of weeks. The goal was to give Miller the maximum amount of scalability, fault tolerance and efficiency as possible. Conquest did this by leveraging two best in class technologies; Compellent storage and VMware server virtualization.
Virtualization Creates Flexible, Scalable IT Powerhouse
The Compellent SAN fully integrates with VMware ESX Server software to virtualize resources across the data center and improve availability of new and legacy investments. Having end-to-end virtualization capabilities gives clients options they never used to have— and when you’re managing a network and servers, that’s a great relief. In the past, clients would make emergency purchases five or six times a year—as much as $10,000 a server. Today, they’re able to centralize, scale and simplify data center storage while saving time and money.
Data center virtualization enables the movement of servers between drives in moments—without interrupting important production operations. “Now, we can perform critical upgrades and maintenance in the middle of the work day rather than the dead of night or over a weekend. Beyond increasing our productivity, the Compellent SAN has given us a great sense of reliability and versatility.”
To increase availability and trim short term and long term costs, while supporting busy construction activities, Rawls boots virtual machines from the Compellent SAN using Server Instant Replay technology. “Boot from SAN makes our hardware almost entirely plug and play. I can just pull out a server, plug in another and we’re instantly moving right along,” say Rawls
Virtualization Helps Miller Go Green With IT
Beyond scalability and fault protection, Rawls is particularly pleased with how easily the Compellent SAN has integrated into the Miller IT infrastructure, especially the company's virtualization strategy. By virtualizing its server resources, the Miller IT team has been able to eliminate 5 physical servers, reducing energy consumption in the Fort Lauderdale facility with no drop in service levels to end users. "We've dropped power usage from an average usage of 40 amps per circuit to about 20 amps per circuit," comments Rawls. This platform laid the foundation for further projects Mr. Rawls contracted Conquest for including a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server deployment to establish a knowledge management system that could capture and share over 35 years of intellectual capital developed be this industry leading award winning organization… and this system also resides today on the virtual infrastructure deployed by Conquest.