Virtualization Platform Migration
Challenge:
A Utica-based Mohawk Valley human service organization that has been a leader in providing social and health care services for people with developmental disabilities has over 40 locations and a large mobile workforce that requires ongoing access from across the Mohawk Valley and Upstate New York regions. The client had a pre-existing virtualization-based solution that was limited in required functionality and prevented the organization from achieving its goals of continuous service and business continuity in a disaster scenario as well as complete redundancy for the production environment.
Solution:
M.A. Polce Consulting, Inc. surveyed the environment and collaborated with the client to identify individual projects that fell under the complete scope of this multi-phase project. Cisco Nexus series switching utilizing features such as HSRP and VPC to provide a redundant, failover core with up to 40GB uplink capacity was installed to the datacenter and leveraged Cisco Catalyst switching for 1GB connectivity to endpoints, data closets, and other 1GB devices. A Cisco UCS and Nimble storage solution utilizing VMware (Cisco SmartStack solution) was deployed, replacing a group of legacy 1U servers and a competing server virtualization platform. VMware components such as VMware High Availability (HA), VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), vCenter Operations Manager (VCOPS), VMware Replication Manager, and VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) were configured in the primary production environment to provide metrics, automatic VM recovery and migration, and other significant components. Finally a Cisco ASA firewall solution with FirePower Services was implemented to further secure the organization and expand upon an already robust HIPAA/PHI compliance mechanism.
Results:
The client has an up-to-date, fully redundant high-speed network, compute, and storage environment. The pre-existing hardware has been repurposed to perform as a disaster recovery target. The network infrastructure now has the capacity to scale for years to come, implementing SFP+ and QSFP+ solutions. Centralized and regular reporting and advanced metrics provide predictable usage and capacity planning analytics for computing and storage. The virtualized server and desktop environment can take advantage of automated failover and resource allocation preventing environment crippling outages. Finally, powerful, and understandable insight into network traffic and threat prevention has helped the organization to become an authoritative leader in the area of model security deployments.
