The Business Challenge
One of the country’s leading manufactures of private labels in the food industry was facing an immediate installation of a new critical application that measures all its shop floor efficiencies. However, they were also planning for a future ERP package implementation. Both their urgent and future IT needs challenged the reliability of their 20-year-old legacy server platform. While their IT team was open to adopting HP as their new server platform, their technology background was not rooted in HP solutions and they needed to complete a full server migration within a short window in order to minimize disruption to the business.
 
The Solution
First, the customer’s IT team met with American Digital’s engineers and HP Business Critical Server specialists in ADC’s Technology Solutions Lab for several hands-on demonstrations of HP integrity servers, C-class blades and HP EVA storage. In addition, American Digital assessed the company’s data center to identify the appropriate solution for the new environment.  In the assessment, ADC engineers not only addressed the need for a new application server but also the capability to consolidate existing application servers with virtualization technology. In addition, American Digital recommended an entirely new backup solution to support the new environment.
The new configuration included a C-class blade server to run the shop floor application and to support the new VMware software. Also, the HP RX8400 integrity server was added for running the database along with an HP EVA8100 for data storage.   “The complete solution that American Digital created for us was thorough in addressing our immediate application server need as well preparing the environment for our future ERP plans.” stated the company’s Senior VP and CIO.   
Once the customer selected HP as the new platform in the data center, rapid deployment was essential.
American Digital devised a collaborative migration plan that included weekly conference calls for the key technical team members, the software application provider, and American Digital.  This approach of working in conjunction with the application provider is part of American Digital’s “Application Ready” methodology that ensures the infrastructure environment is 100% prepared for the application.
The CIO added, “American Digital created a true partnership work environment that kept all those involved on-track and working in-tandem. The incredible teamwork ensured the timely installation and knowledge transfer for this business critical project.”   
Another integral part of the 3-week turn-around time, American Digital engineers were able to stage and test all of the equipment at the ADC Technology Solutions Center prior to its arrival to the customer.  On-site at the customer,   American Digital engineers conducted a complete knowledge transfer – advising them on how to deploy the application for optimal performance on their new HP platform.  The training also included how to administer the new servers and EVA storage equipment, VMware, and HP Data Protector Software. American Digital addressed backup and recovery issues and guided them past typical migration pitfalls. 
 
The Benefits
This server platform migration resulted in an entirely new HP operating environment without the addition of any new IT administrators and with zero application downtime.  The CIO commented,” It’s quite remarkable when you think that my team was successfully working in a completely new computing environment within a matter of weeks. This is testament to the invaluable expertise of American Digital. They helped us remove technology as a barrier to capturing the business value of our new application.”    
The new server and storage infrastructure not only reduced the risk and maintenance of a legacy system but, also served as a conduit to business continuity and disaster recovery.