elegant solution | serverless office
Eradicating Yesteryear’s Arduous Branch Infrastructure
If you still have servers physically on site at each of your branch locations, its time to get into the metaphorical phone booth, put on the red cape, and rescue them from the hassles of related capital expenditures, cumbersome support, and poor application performance.
Save your company from the archaic design of yesteryear and discuss the merits of the “serverless” office solution. You will bring a welcome idea to the table. Having a server at each location is archaic and fraught with challenges because it is fundamentally hard to support. Simple maintenance such as licensing and keeping each server
up-to-snuff and in compliance is an unnecessarily laborious and stressful endeavor -- not only because it consumes your internal resources -- it also chomps away at profit margins and consumes precious capital.
Recently, we helped a customer who was facing significant challenges due to high consumption of bandwidth
going to applications such as Exchange, SharePoint, Internet applications, etc. They had a large number of file
and print servers (over 500) deployed across 140 offices causing management and maintenance to be difficult
and expensive.
The customer needed a way to accelerate remote user access to critical applications, control the costs of our
ever-rising bandwidth needs and reduce server count. Additionally, there was a lack of secure data backups, which caused compliance risks. We determined that a decentralized IT infrastructure and support model were at the root of suboptimal IT economics and recommended the following:
1. A WAN optimization and application acceleration initiative to facilitate
centralization of infrastructure while maintaining high application availability.
2. A managed workstation and end user helpdesk initiative to dramatically improve
support response and resolution times and proactively maintain application uptime.
Digital Hands proposed moving to a “serverless office” through innovative technology for remote locations as well as outsourcing workstation management and end user support. The solution eliminates the chronic need for increased spending in bandwidth, server, hardware, and management and saves the customer over $3 million across 140 offices over 3 years. Furthermore, end users will see an increase in IT availability, support, and workstation security.
The solution: Consolidation, Virtualization.
Our team removed servers from branches, centralized applications at the data center, and virtualized data center servers where appropriate, resulting in higher availability and reduced costs.
To optimize the branch offices we deployed critical network services (DNS, DHCP, NTP and Print Services) via Riverbed appliances to the branch allowing it to save costs and maintain operations in the event a core service is offline at the data center.
The “phase-two” solution included workstation cleanup – that is we removed all pre-existing malware, updated all Microsoft patches to ensure optimal configuration and provided helpdesk support. Our thinking was that transitioning services from the on-site model to Digital Hands remote management would definitely improve response and resolution time as well as increase the management and security of all of the endpoint devices, which it did and then some!
Today the customer has a complete inventory of all workstations and a hardware refresh strategy to manage hardware costs.
Our professional services engagement resulted in optimal hardware configuration, reduced management costs, and increased end user productivity. Our customer experienced productivity gains in the following areas:
File transfer data reduction of 85% over a 30-day period (Optimized bandwidth capacity increase of 7.06x)
Overall total data reduction of 71% over a 30-day period (Optimized bandwidth capacity increase of 3.45x)
Ability to distribute Rich Media (Video, Audio) without additional investment in branch infrastructure
$750/month savings per branch on planned additional bandwidth infrastructure
$400/month savings on backup tape
Improved compliance, backup, and/or replication
Reduced headcount for local IT support
Increased end user satisfaction and productivity
Increased security
Increased IT availability
Increased Application availability
Reduced human resource hours from 1,100 hours a month to 54.7 hours a month
Reduced average response time from 20+ minutes to 19.41 seconds
Reduced final resolution time from days or weeks to less than 20 minutes
Make WAN optimization and the “serverless office” your next discussion topic.
For more information on this subject, call 813.222.3026 or email sales@digitalhands.com.
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