CUSTOMER PROFILE 
W. A. Wilde is a nationally recognized leader in direct marketing solutions and personalized communications. Wilde provides a comprehensive suite of business solutions for companies across a wide range of industries. Their personalized communication specialties include agency services, print on demand, direct mail services and fulfillment.
CHALLENGE
W.A. Wilde's primary data center in Massachusetts supports more than 400 employees located in four different offices. The company's business is dependent upon specialized applications, unique to the mailing and printing industry, that demand tremendous computing power and storage capacity. In 2004, Wilde moved from a hardware-based server environment to one virtualized with VMware. Six years later, with storage pushing the infrastructure's 20 terabyte limit and performance lagging, the time had come to upgrade the aging environment.
The technology refresh involved all of Wilde's storage, server and SAN technology, so the IT organization wanted to carefully evaluate the pros and cons of every possible option. But finding accurate information - particularly current product comparisons - was nearly impossible.
Implementing the system-wide upgrade presented an even bigger challenge. With the majority of their critical 7x24 environment virtualized, the IT team needed to ensure that
the technology upgrade with completed with zero downtime.
SOLUTION
Wilde turned to Daymark Solutions for help. Daymark had guided Wilde's first VMware implementation, and has assisted in countless IT projects in the ensuing years. Daymark's consultants helped the company:
- Research and objectively evaluate multiple storage options and migration approaches
- Architect an environment that includes EMC storage arrays with Flash drive technology, SUN high-performance multicore enterprise ESX servers, and an implementation strategy
based on VMware's VMotion and DRS capability
- Implement a more cost-effective tiered storage environment that includes Serial ATA (SATA) for long-term storage and Solid State Disk (SSD) for the specialized applications
that require peak performance
- Upgrade the backup environment to support NetBackup for file-level backups and vRanger for VMware backups
- Reconfigure the RAID group design of the critical SQL database to maximize performance
RESULTS
In just 7 weeks, Wilde was able to successfully transition to its new environment, without incurring business downtime or impacting customers. The technology refresh has achieved
the company's goals of improved performance and increased storage capacity, according to Matt Ronn, Director of IT at Wilde.
"Everything is bigger and faster. In the past, it would take forever to run reports on certain applications. Now, our users never complain about performance," he explains. "Plus, with
the new tiering strategy, we are not wasting high-performance disk on data that doesn't change."
Ronn believes Daymark's assistance was invaluable at every stage of the project, from offering virtualization expertise to creating an independent analysis for all the products
under consideration to designing and implementing the upgrade.
"Daymark gave us the behind-the-scenes information we needed to make the right decisions," he says. "When it came to migrating to the new environment, we needed to forklift everything electronically. We didn't know how to do that. That's why we have Daymark. I have never been disappointed."