Case Study: Keeping the Wisconsin Army National Guard Mission Capable

Background

The Wisconsin Army National Guard engaged SwishData in September 2008. SwishData had equipment on-site by October and began work before the holidays. By spring 2009, the WIARNG was fully standalone and optimized. SwishData maintains a relationship with the WIARNG and continues to support its mission.

Challenge

The Wisconsin Army National Guard’s data infrastructure had essentially scaled out of control. There were numerous file servers to maintain. For the staff and resources the WIARNG had, managing IT had become too labor-intensive to continue. The organization needed to go from a fractured, management-intensive environment to a unified, optimized, scalable, and automated architecture that provides protection to critical applications during backup.

SwishData began this engagement like every other—with a dialogue about what the customer’s most pressing concerns are. Every sale starts with a conversation, not just a price quote. SwishData’s initial consultations with a potential client involve live white-boarding sessions. Sometimes, customers have never even seen their own IT infrastructure sketched out. SwishData asks, “What is the idealized end state of this project?”

“We take that question, architect the solution, and leverage it into a logical, phased approach to reach the goal,” says Chris Kerr, SwishData’s U.S. Army account manager. “We design projects so that each phase is standalone and brings value without negating an earlier phase.”

To SwishData, this project was more than just a storage sell. The WIARNG has IT ‘studs’ who are smart and highly motivated, but those experts struggled with the resources they had on hand, fighting a battle against a data infrastructure that kept growing. What the organization needed was a unified storage architecture system—including consolidation onto one enterprise backup solution.

The WIARNG had numerous storage systems, resulting in a fractured architecture. Critical applications were not protected during backup, and there were many file servers and disparate application server/storage silos to maintain. What caused these problems was an ever-growing mission where the organization was provided with disk storage each time requirements grew. The result was an amalgamation of many generic products that couldn’t scale efficiently, were costly to maintain, and required divergent knowledge sets.

Solution

Based on the WIARNG’s defined objectives, SwishData provided the organization with the statewide IT resources it needed for command and control, including a continuity of operations (COOP) plan for the organization’s backup site that is a distance away from headquarters. Now, the WIARNG’s IT systems are uniform and automated.
The WIARNG manages about 30 TB of production data, including applications such as VMWare, SQL databases and Exchange, plus flat files and user data. In addition, the organization uses a replication system housed almost 100 miles away from its headquarters to provide COOP should the organization encounter a site-level IT issue or need disaster recovery.

“We were able to provide more virtualization to make managing and scaling their world that much easier,” Kerr says. “It’s uniform and automated, and we are a single point of success for this organization. They know they can come to us with their various needs and we can support them.”

During deployment, SwishData’s specialists helped make the WIARNG experts in maintaining the new solutions. The organization’s management challenges dwindled. SwishData credits the success of this project, and others like it, to the company’s ability to truly become a member of a customer’s team.