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 it’s 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 recommendations 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 it’s 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.
