CLOUD TO CO-LOCATION MIGRATION

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SAVING OUR CLIENT OVER $1.5 MILLION OVER 5 YEARS

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​The Problem:

​Our client's CFO asked us to come in & analyze their information technology infrastructure & expense.  Their apps & data were being hosted by a 3rd party Cloud provider in Las Vegas.  They were having many problems with their environment including slowness, connectivity problems, & servers going down.  Their desktop ticket count was being sustained, on average, at 150 tickets.

 

Their Cloud hosting expense was $32,000 per month. 

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How We Helped

​The client had 4 manufacturing plants in two states so an on premise solution was not ideal.  We recommended purchasing a state of the art, 3 server cluster solution to be hosted at a local data center which was best in class.  The cluster provided redundancy with 24/7/365 uptime.  The co-lo gave them 24/7/365 uptime with redundant Internet & electricity in a secure facility.  This local datacenter is where Cloud providers host their servers.  Their monthly expense went from $32,000/month to $1,450/month.  ​The cost of the cluster & the rack buildout in the co-location facility was $282,817 which included labor.

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Cloud to Co-location Facility Savings

Annual Cloud Hosting Fee  $384,000​

Hardware & Software Investment  $282,817

           Annual Co-lo fees  $17,400

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Savings 1st Year $83,783

Savings 2nd-5th Year $366,600 per year

Total Savings for 5 Years $1,550,183

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Troubleshooting Complex Problems

We deep dived into their environment & their tickets eventually went from a sustained 150 tickets down to 30 tickets on average.  The problems we solved:

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• Citrix Problems:
  We resolved the largest problem of consistent slowness by upgrading their Citrix servers to the latest version.  We also increased the number of servers from 16 to 28, & increased the RAM on each server from 8 GB to 24GB.  For power users, we provided dedicated Citrix servers.
   

• Internet Speed:
  We upgraded all 4 of their locations Internet speed to 1GB.  Some locations only had 20 MG.
   

• Virtual Server Corruption on Main Drive:
  Their main drive was 9TB & had underlying corruption.  We migrated their data to 2 (ea) fresh Microsoft Windows Server 2022 instances.
   

• Printer problems:
  We added more resources to the print servers & updated the print drivers.
   

• Excel Power User:
  After the Citrix upgrades, this power user continued to have problems with Excel slowness.  Our engineer looked at the Excel spreadsheet & determined that the spreadsheet was so large & complex, that every time she added data, it was calculating the entire spreadsheet.  It was switched to calculate manually only.

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Further Accomplishments
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• For a disaster recovery/business continuity solution, we replicated their servers to a Cloud-based solution for $4,000/year;
   

• Their 3 physical server cluster are being monitored 24/7/365 with a cloud-based system for $60/month;
   

• Their 44 virtual machines are monitored, for a one time configuration fee, with a Nagios solution that is constantly tuned & upgraded for additional monitoring points.

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If your business is being excessively charged for Cloud services, please contact us.  We can help.

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