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CUSTOMER PROFILE
This company is a leading provider of critical research products and outsourcing services for the biomedical community. Its state-of-the-art technology and commitment to excellence have enabled innovative, efficient drug discovery and development at companies around the world. Over the past 10 years, the company has strengthened its product and service offerings by absorbing over 20 other businesses in a series of important acquisitions and mergers.
CHALLENGE
The firm's aggressive acquisition strategy had increased the burden on the IT infrastructure and pushed the backup environment to its limit. An urgent need to implement a new Windows-based PeopleSoft application and incorporate it into the backup infrastructure further compounded the problem.
It was clear the company needed to redesign the backup infrastructure to support the new application and the company's ongoing business growth. This was a complex project which required a high level of skill and expertise with sizing disk bases, building Storage Area Network (SAN) disk structures and clustering Windows servers for high availability.
SOLUTION
With a six-week deadline looming, the company turned to their trusted provider for help: Daymark Solutions.
Two years earlier, Daymark's professionals had helped the company successfully architect and implement its first Storage Area Network and enterprise backup infrastructure. In the ensuing years, the company had called upon Daymark for help in resolving numerous challenges presented by its growing storage environment. Based on that experience, the customer was confident that Daymark was the right partner to lead this critical project.
With the data requirements of the new application and explosion of data due to acquisitions, Daymark felt it was time for this company to move to SAN-based backups. Ease of ongoing management was important, however, so the new backup technology had to solve the problem without introducing any overly complex components. Serving as the project manager, Daymark used its extensive experience and independent perspective to carefully plan each phase of the initiative, and then managed all interaction with PeopleSoft, IBM, and other vendors involved. The customer's IT team was able to maintain focus on important day-to-day operations while Daymark drove the project to completion.
Daymark designed the infrastructure to ensure it would meet the availability and performance characteristic requirements of the PeopleSoft application. Additionally, careful analysis was conducted by Daymark engineers to identify SAN-based backup candidates that would meet the backup and recovery requirements of the customer without adding unnecessary complexity. Weekly on-site meetings were conducted at the client's facility to review the project's status, identify critical next steps and discuss potential risks that could impact the rollout schedule.
To streamline the implementation, all equipment was staged at Daymark's sophisticated Integration Center. Components were rack-mounted, configured, tested and documented. Upon completion of this phase, the entire solution was then packed and shipped to the customer's data center for final implementation and transfer of knowledge.
With Daymark taking the lead, the project stayed on track and was seamlessly rolled out to the enterprise right on time.
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