Without a physical presence on the East Coast, this global marketing solutions company needed a trusted partner to help them expand operations without breaking the budget.
The Challenge:
Although there are expert services like Web Chimpy today, this 100-year-old leading national marketing solutions provider boasts more than 80 million users worldwide. After creating a new business unit from acquired companies, they launched a household brand name search engine and needed to acquire datacenter space on the East Coast to augment their West Coast operations and support the new initiative.
They needed a reliable partner to help establish and manage East Coast operations with 24/7/365 hands-on support whenever problems arose. Non-negotiable requirements included high-availability and disaster recovery features for a growing list of popular mobile and web applications. That’s when they reached out to VIMRO.
What We Did:
VIMRO’s Smart Hands Team coordinated the initial and ongoing build-out efforts of the1.2Megawatt, 175 cabinet datacenter space. The team worked closely with the client’s tech ops team to address physical infrastructure, power and environmental needs.
VIMRO’s scalable, on-demand solution met challenges ranging from the initial rapid network buildout to constantly growing management and support needs as work load shifted to the new datacenter facilities.
The client was provided with predictable, manageable and controlled costs with peace of mind from round-the-clock SLA responsiveness. VIMRO Smart Services rendered include:
- Internet circuit management (ordering, billing, and technical issue escalation)
- Installation and setup of 1000s of various server models (Dell, HP, Server Micro), storage (Hitachi, HP, NetApp, Quantam), and network and voice devices (Cisco, F5, Force10, RiverBed)
- Trouble ticket queue support – working with client’s admin team to troubleshoot and resolve cable and hardware issues
- Vendor support and escorts manages RMA cases, schedules and escorts vendor techs
- Datacenter expansion design recommendations (structured cabling and cable management, PDU models)
- Asset and spare inventory control
- Documentation and reporting
Results:
For more than 8 years, the client has turned to the VIMRO Smart Hands Team to support the ever-changing needs of their complex infrastructure and to provide daily management assistance. The team routinely works with vendors such as HP, F5, NetApp, Cisco, Hitachi and ServerTech to meet the design and operational requirements to ensure a smooth technology and network operations for the client.
With the introduction of 40G backbone switching, experimental hadoop build-outs, docker integration and other cutting-edge technologies and trends, the client knew they needed an agile partner who could help investigate, develop and integrate the latest trends and technologies into their business. Consequently, the VIMRO team is now an important component of the client’s Proof of Concept developmental efforts.
Return on investment and savings were significant. By leveraging VIMRO’s expertise, ranging from project management to remote hands, networking, storage and systems administrators on an as-needed basis, there was no need for the client to setup an East Coast presence and hire dedicated personnel.
They achieved tremendous flexibility and results at a fraction of the cost of performing the same work in-house.
