Business Success Story - PRI Asphalt Technologies, Inc.

PRI is a long-standing customer of Big Sur. Big Sur recently performed an IT infrastructure assessment to ascertain the state of the network and identify key areas of concern. The major recommendations for improvement were aging, out of warranty servers; aging backup equipment resulting in massive backup windows of 24+ hours; and the need for a more powerful firewall and VPN access.

Big Sur provided a comprehensive plan based on their assessment. Servers were replaced with new HP Proliant servers running Microsoft Server 2008. Microsoft Distributed File System was configured between the servers to improve data availability in case of failure or heavy load. The aging tape drive was replaced with a new HP Ultrium Storageworks tape drive and Symantec Backup Exec 12d was installed to provide backup and recovery capabilities. A Cisco ASA firewall replaced the previous Linksys router, providing both VPN access and a more powerful firewall for the network.

As a result of the project, PRI's backup window decreased from 24+ hours on multiple tapes to 2 hours on a single tape. Users now experience minimum downtime even in the event of one server locking up or having a hardware failure. The network is fully secure and remote network access is available for traveling users. In addition, Hyper-V virtualization was used to provide a Sophos anti-virus server for central manageability.

With new, in-warranty servers, efficient backups, a fully secured network and the support of the Big Sur team, PRI is fully prepared to meet their own customers needs and continue growing in the future.

Business Success Story - Boys and Girls Club of Tampa Bay

Boys and Girls Club of Tampa Bay had specific requests for Big Sur: a better solution for terminal applications, consolidation of physical servers and implementation of virtualization technology. Boys and Girls Club has multiple locations with remote users, needing access to apps residing at a central location. The server room was struggling with cooling, and aging hardware needed an upgrade. Also, in order to bring them up to current levels of technology, Exchange 5.5 needed to be upgraded to Exchange 2003.

Using Microsoft Server 2008 running Hyper-V, Big Sur consolidated seven physical servers into only two, running nine virtual machines. The server room cooling problems were eliminated as a result. Costs were brought down by using one solution for multiple purposes: Hyper-V on Server 2008 provides both virtualization and terminal services, consolidating software and reducing overhead. Hardware costs were kept to a minimum, as were software costs, by leveraging one operating system to provide multiple solutions. All servers are now easily manageable through the Hyper-V Hypervisor console. Reboots and maintenance are quick and easy due to the non-reliance on physical hardware. Adding disk space should a server's drive reach capacity is manageable with no downtime.