Case Study
Study, Plan, Design and Build Hyper-Converged Infrastructure based Virtualization solution for a Leading Hospitality Organization
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Problem Statement:
Customer had Siloed IT Setup at multiple locations with de-centralized identities accessing multiple applications. There was absence of inhouse technical expertise for large scale integration of IT Infrastructure, user identities and network infrastructure. The current multi-vendor IT landscape posed problems for managing both data and its backup across multiple locations. Customer was missing centralized control over users, compute, information access and mobile devices leading to uncertainty over effective policies and access control on users and devices accessing corporate data.
Project Details
- Industry: Hospitality
- Catregory: Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
- Project Head: Mr. Phani Kumar
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Design & Methodology:
ValuePoint suggested the customer to centralize their Data Center to be able to apply effective centralized policies for application and information access. Also, their critical application which is the lifeline for their customer facing business was recommended to be hosted at their Disaster Recovery location.
- The scope also included a proper study, plan, design and implementation of Centralized Active Directory for authentication, authorization and access control.
- The Centralized Active Directory design must ensure that effective Group Policies and Access Control drill down to every location of the client’s presence.
Hence, Additional Domain Controllers hosting all Global Catalog objects were designed to be installed at every location along with Domain Name Services to be able to cater to link failures and faster authentication.
For hosting critical applications, a detailed design and deployment plan for Hyper Converged Infrastructure solution at centralized DC was planned. Design and deployment of backup solution was done for quick and efficient backup and restore of information within the HCI system. An external backup infrastructure was also planned for long term retention of data as per organization’s policy and applicable compliances. SDWAN solution design and deployment was done over redundant networks for efficient and secure connectivity of all locations to centralized DC. ValuePoint scope included identification of existing gaps and prerequisites, advise on recommended infrastructure, supply necessary hardware and software, build success criteria from client requirements, and implement the solution planned and designed to help our customer mitigate the current risks and adopt the new infrastructure at all locations with the latest industry-led technologies.
ValuePoint's Solution:
A 3-node HCI cluster was setup over All-Flash disks providing redundancies against not only disk failures but also against one complete node failure. Six (6) nodes of Windows servers were deployed at branch & DC locations for quicker AD logins, delegated management and file services. A single Server node was deployed at DR location to cater to service availability of the customer’s critical application during disasters. A Backup Server node was supplied at DC along with Capacity based backup license for backing up the data from the HCI infrastructure to an external system as a risk mitigation strategy along with industry-standard backup methodology. There were Core and Access switching solution provided at DC for connecting the HCI network and SDWAN network along with leading Virtualization software for compute and network virtualization. SDWAN routers with Cloud based controller were proposed for secure connectivity of all locations to centralized DC along with Server security licenses for all the Physical and Virtual Servers in the DC and branch locations. Hypervisor and Operating System licensing as needed to complete the solution and customer requirement was sized, supplied and implemented for the customer. The complete hardware and software proposed was offered with 3 years 24×7 warranty for running mission critical applications for ensuring immediate support in case of eventualities.
Customer Benefits:
Customer was able to get a cost effective solution with quicker deployment timelines. The offered solution has Scale-Up and Scale-Out capabilities for maximum scalability. The solution has an inbuilt efficient and quick backup solution for maximum data protection. This addressed the data integrity and availability concern of customer. Effective Active Directory policies and permissions leading to Single Sign On using Active Directory Identity addressed the confidentiality requirement of the customer. External backup solution for long term retention implementation has made customer to match their compliance requirements. A new Single Forest AD which was designed keeping in mind their future cloud requirements can easily be synchronized to cloud based directory services for extending the Single Sign On identity to Cloud-based and external applications that support federated logons. A high performance, highly-available, secure and future-ready solution was made available to the customer to match current and future requirements of their organization. Finally, the customer had ONE TRUSTED PARTNER to manage their different platforms and solutions with SPOC for ease of communication, escalation and reporting.