Challenge
In 2016, Syracuse Label & Surround Printing built a new facility in North Syracuse, located in the Airport Business Park. Their existing virtual and storage environment was approaching the end of its life cycle and had been in production at their Liverpool, New York facility for six years. Over those six years, the company experienced considerable technological and revenue growth. This growth required a new facility, providing an opportune time to upgrade their storage and virtualization environment at the new location. Upgrading the technology environment during a physical move with no downtime would require many hours of planning, testing, and designing.
Solution
M.A. Polce designed a solution consisting of a Cisco UCS Mini blade chassis coupled with Nimble storage, Cisco switches, and a Cisco firewall with FirePower services. The solution was implemented in three phases.
Phase 1 was the Cisco UCS and VMware Host installation, encompassing the SAN and host infrastructure configuration, including VMware, Storage, and switching.
Phase 2 was the migration from the HP VSA Platform to Cisco UCS. This phase covered the migration of VMs to the new VMware infrastructure. This included the configuration of VMware Converter, conversion of virtual machines, and decommissioning of old infrastructure services. To facilitate these conversions, the equipment was briefly staged at the existing site to migrate some data that would have been too cumbersome to pull over the configured temporary link.
Phase 3 was the relocation of the UCS and Nimble SAN. During the last phase, M.A. Polce relocated the Cisco UCS, Nimble SAN, and AS/400 to the North Syracuse location.
Business Outcome
The migration from multiple physical hosts to a single virtualized blade chassis saved rack space, cooling, and power requirements. It also simplified the management and increased the reliability of their environment. The scalability and flexibility of the Cisco UCS and Nimble storage allowed M.A. Polce to upgrade their network while moving their offices with virtually no downtime.
