Case Studies

Case Study – Increasing Business Efficiency with a Fully Managed Hosted Cloud Platform

19 Aug

CLIENT PROFILE

Fortessa Tableware Solutions (FTS) is a globally recognized leader in the design, development and marketing of commercial and consumer tableware products, serving the commercial foodservices market as well as the high-end consumer market.

THE CHALLENGE
FTS managed a small, in-house IT department, which struggled with scaling a growing infrastructure. During its expansion period in 2013, FTS worked with several ERP, CRM, and PIM software vendors to build FTS software applications in support of FTS online presence. During this period, FTS did not have the resources or the bandwidth to internally manage the scaled infrastructure needed to host and support software applications simultaneously. FTS needed a fully managed hosted cloud platform – full service management of network, servers, storage and databases – including 24x7x365 monitoring, OS upgrade, patching, problem resolution and remediation.

FTS’ infrastructure, a critical underlying support component of its business operations, required specific resources and hosting expertise. Their infrastructure included 47 virtual machines with 6.1 Terabytes of usable fiber channel SAN storage, and 35 laptops – all of which needed to be migrated to the cloud. However, FTS lacked the necessary documentation on their servers and configuration management, which made it challenging for them to migrate to a cloud platform on their own.

NEOVERA SOLUTION
Neovera proposed a fully Managed Hosted Cloud Platform with 24x7x365 monitoring, OS upgrade and patching, which included the following services to meet FTS’ infrastructure needs:

  • Migrate, architect and implement a fully managed cloud environment
  • Provide physical and logical security of all infrastructure and data
  • Implement a backup solution that covers routine incremental and full backups
  • Redundant high speed network connectivity
  • Remote access capability through VPN
  • Compliance with technical environment roadmap (e.g. Microsoft updates)
  • Monitoring
  • Mutually agreed and published maintenance and outage schedule to minimize application downtime
  • High availability and redundancy across all infrastructure and application components.
  • Transfer Client X’s existing licenses
  • Citrix and VDI monitoring, patching, problem resolution and remediation.

Neovera worked closely with the FTS IT team to develop a project plan and architecture plan to ensure minimal downtime of their systems as they were transitioned to the new data center facility. The project was implemented in three phases.

Phase 1 – Planning and Design
During this phase, the Neovera team worked closely with key stakeholders within FTS’ IT department to gather requirements and design each component of the solution spanning across server, storage, network and security. Requirements gathered during the planning phase focused on the following areas:

  • Server build design
  • Network infrastructure and management
  • Storage area networking (SAN)
  • Security including firewall, SSL and VPN
  • Monitoring
  • Server load balancing
  • High availability and redundancy
  • Disaster recovery
  • Backups
  • IP Addressing and DNS requirements
  • Disaster recovery design (if applicable)

Phase 2 – Setup and Migration
The Neovera team worked closely with the FTS IT team to implement the architecture and design captured in Phase 1. The overall migration and cutover strategy was developed with the objective of minimizing infrastructure downtime while streamlining the transition. Key tasks during the setup and migration phase included:

  • Physical to Virtual migration of servers if needed (P2V)
  • Test and validate the solution
  • Stage and validate migrated data

Phase 3 – Operations and Managed Services
Once FTS applications were successfully migrated to the new data center facilities, Neovera’s Network Operations Center began actively monitoring the servers, databases, and network using Neovera’s leading monitoring technology systems. This enables Neovera to identify and resolve any infrastructure problems prior to critical business impacts.

  • Neovera provided all the services needed to setup the new infrastructure environment for FTS and executed the migration effort for all hosted and managed options. Neovera’s initial setup services included installation, powering, networking and configuration of all infrastructure components.
  • Neovera also educated the FTS IT staff on antivirus solutions, and recommended server upgrades as needed. Neovera identified single points of failure, mitigated those areas, and made recommendations to diversify server configuration to build in redundancy to reduce downtime in cases of server failure.

BOTTOM LINE RESULTS
In total, 50 servers and 35 laptops were successfully migrated over to Neovera’s cloud solution. With more experienced engineers monitoring the FTS infrastructure on a 24×7 support basis, IT worry and headache were eliminated – freeing up FTS staff to focus on more business centric tasks. In addition, server efficiency was improved significantly, allowing Fortessa Tableware Solutions to focus on delivering better service to their customer base and end users.