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The Background
The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) is a small, independent
agency that helps settle labor and management disputes by acting as a neutral
third party in the discussion. The Agency helps build better relationships
through joint problem-solving and constructive responses to inevitable
conflict. In turn, this improves the ability of organizations to create value for
customers, shareholders and employees alike, and substantially benefits the
national economy. In addition, the Agency concentrates its efforts on assisting
employers and employees in coping with the demands of a rapidly changing
workplace.
The Challenge
In the course of the past year, FMCS had identified a need to
plan and implement a working disaster recovery site because
the agency’s only recovery system was comprised of offsite
backup tapes for restoring systems to the agency’s 20 servers.
FMCS wanted to ensure that any software it purchased would be able to
support the requirements of the disaster recovery site. The agency could not
afford unexpected downtime, lost data, or additional expenditures. “We were
looking for a way to get information on our hardware usage that we could then
put against the hardware we purchased,” says James Donnen, IT Specialist for
FMCS. “We needed to make sure the hardware we purchased would handle the
workload placed on the servers.”
Nortec Strategic Account Executive Deb Wiker had been in contact with FMCS,
so when the agency proposed the implementation of a high-availability disaster
recovery site, Wiker suggested a virtualization solution as a way to reduce
underutilization and management costs, as well as provide solutions to FMCS’s
concerns about disaster recovery and business continuity.
The Solution
Wiker explained that virtualization allows several virtual machines to run
independently - with their own virtual hardware and operating systems - while
the actual physical hardware components are installed on one physical
machine or server.
Because virtual machines are encapsulated into files, administrators are able to
move, save or copy entire systems, including fully configured applications, in
just seconds, from one physical server to another with no down time.
Wiker then recommended that FMCS install VMware’s Capacity Planner and let
it run for a month as a proof of concept of the agency’s disaster recovery implementation
plan. This would allow the agency to see how it was utilizing servers
and how it could take advantage of resources it wasn’t using. “We wanted to
have the software installed, have it run for an amount of time and then get a
report back with the results to find out how hard our system uses physical
resources,” says Donnen.
After the testing phase concludes, Nortec and FMCS would then continue with
the virtualization of the entire production environment. “We thought this
would be a good measure to make sure the equipment we purchased will
handle the job,” says Donnen.
Nortec worked with FMCS to set up the VMware Capacity Planner on its servers
and storage systems and implemented a schedule for continuing disaster
recovery implementation and for ongoing troubleshooting.
Benefits
The VMware Capacity Planner proof of concept did just that: “We verified that
the hardware we purchased would handle our system and that we didn’t have
to purchase additional equipment or go a different route,” says Donnen. In
addition, VMware’s Capacity Planner identified what the FMCS system currently
uses and how that complements the planned disaster recovery site.
Beyond delivering a seal of approval of FMCS’s hardware, the VMware Capacity
Planner has confirmed that the agency can now proceed as planned with its
disaster recovery implementation. “Our entire organization will benefit because
we will be able to implement our DR site the way we were planning,” says
Donnen. FMCS will also benefit from productivity and cost savings as a virtualized
environment reduces the amount of time needed to recover data and is
cheaper than replicating the system on physical servers.
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