Partek helps South Country Coop increase system availability, while providing a more reliable environment.
CHALLENGE:
With the move to a brand new, state-of-the-art building, South Country Co-Op required an upgrade of their core IT backbone, including switches and virtualization hardware.
South Country Co-op was formed from an amalgamation of two smaller Co-op’s in 2015. Both companies were using inadequate IT support structures to properly handle their joint needs, as they essentially doubled overnight. Today they are a company with over 50 retail locations and growing, and services an area that runs from Medicine Hat, to Oyen, and west to High River. With their large service area they depend on reliability day in and day out.
APPROACH:
Being member-owned also means that any profits are returned to their members and stay in the local economy. With that in mind, it was important to design a system that balanced performance, reliability, but also cost.
High availability, reliable hardware was going to be key for this project, with a focus on warranty and support. Partek knew that Dell would be the optimal provider for this hardware given its track record of providing highly reliable enterprise hardware. Fiber connections would be utilized across the network to increase performance between core switches and servers. With planned downtime at a minimum it was vital to complete the project within the time parameters specified by South Country Coop.
SOLUTION:
Partek utilized its position as a Dell Premier Partner to architect a new storage environment for South Country. Using Dell PowerVault Direct Attached Storage (DAS) hardware, coupled with Microsoft Hyper-V, Partek envisioned a more streamlined approached to data management and virtual machine operation.
Core switches were replaced by Ubiquiti’s Unifi Switch hardware, which combined 10G fiber connections between the switches, with PoE capability. Our technical team migrated all core VM’s to the PowerVault DAS with minimal downtime, and within the appropriate maintenance window provided.
Today South Country Coop has the capability to work within their facility as well as with all of their retail locations, tying the company`s data stream together to enhance communications and productivity. The flow of data in a reliable manner is the heartbeat of company efficiency, and now South Country Coop has the capacity to do that.
