BlueLock: On-Demand Infrastructure

“We build one of two things for our clients,” says Pat O’Day, chief technology officer at Bluelock. “We either build a dedicated hosting environment to run an online application, or we build a disaster recovery target for an environment that’s running somewhere else. In either case, a combination of VMware and LeftHand solutions provides the behind-the-scenes technology for our operations.” VMware® Infrastructure 3 works with LeftHand Network’s iSCSI SAN architecture to create a highly available and flexible IT environment.

“Since our servers are 100 percent virtualized through VMware technology, we need to have a storage solution that is also virtual— and LeftHand is one of the only truly virtualized SANs out there today. The two solutions work together to provide performance on demand so that we can readily adjust to our clients’ infrastructure needs.”

Results
- Halve costs of creating and maintaining a disaster recovery site. “Historically, creating a disaster recovery site involved replicating your production environment and then finding a way to move data back and forth between the two sites, usually with a fibre channel,” says O’Day. “By using VMware technology and LeftHand iSCSI SANs, we can give our clients a 100 percent virtual disaster recovery site and screaming fast data speeds—and it usually costs half as much.”
- Provision servers in hours rather than weeks. “Rapid server provisioning is one of the biggest benefits of VMware technology,” says O’Day. “We can add new servers to someone’s environment almost instantly without having to order new hardware and wait for it to arrive.”
- Reduce recovery time from hours to minutes. “We have full fault tolerance and redundancy on all our disk volumes,” says O’Day. “If we lose one disk system, it switches over without interruption. That’s a priceless benefit.”