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The National Association of Manufacturers
(NAM) is the preeminent US manufacturers
association as well as the nation’s largest
industrial trade association, representing small and large manufacturers in every industrial
sector and in all 50 states. Manufacturing employs nearly 12 million workers, contributes
more than $1.6 trillion to the U.S. economy annually. NAM is the largest driver of
economic growth in the nation and accounts for the lion’s share of private sector research
and development.
Jeff Colburn, NAM’s Vice President, discussed their pervious infrastructure and shared
that their entire association was working with only one physical database server. Colburn
was concerned with the organization’s Continuity of Operations Plan and normal failures
that any system can experience. He knew NAM would be in serious trouble if its one
server went down.
The Challenge
Colburn knew it was only a matter of time before the system would experience some
level of failure. Even a minor system failure would pose serious problems for NAM’s daily
operations. It was apparent that the National Association of Manufacturers needed to
look at alternative solutions to its current configuration, in order to implement cost-effect
redundancy, Colburn knew he wanted to move in the direction of virtualizing his
organization’s server.
The Solution
Colburn began evaluating VMware and Microsoft’s Hyper-V cluster. Ultimately Colburn
selected MS Hyper-V because it was not only the best fit for their organization, but also
the most economical.
Nortec immediately met with NAM and made ecommendations based on existing hardware.
In a just few weeks Nortec was setting up the new infrastructure. The actual
upgrade took only a matter of days and the entire process from inventory to hardware
selection took 5 weeks. The project was completed both on time and on budget. Once
completed, Nortec provided extensive training to NAM’s in-house IT department.
The Benefits
Nortec has given the National Association of Manufacturers the redundancy its required to
run continuously and effectively. Now with the MS Hyper-V cluster, NAM is no longer
running an infrastructure that would be affected by a single point of failure.
If workloads are changed, virtualization makes reallocation of resources fast and easy. Nothing
is lost and business is not interrupted. “If one machine has performance issues, we
simply reallocate it to another CPU,” Colburn states. NAM’s development team has
benefited as well, as the developers can simply roll back to the previous software version if
necessary during software version development.
Implementing Nortec’s Hyper-V cluster solution has provided the National Association of
Manufacturers with a secure platform to increase hardware utilization, optimize network,
improve server availability and most importantly, give the redundancy NAM desired.
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