The Background
Founded in 1943, The Interstate Family of Companies (Interstate Van Lines, Interstate Moving & Storage, Interstate International, and Interstate Relocation Services), encompasses a worldwide group of transportation, warehousing, relocation management, logistics and real estate solutions serving government, corporate, and individual clients. The company maintains its headquarters in Springfield, VA, and has offices in Maryland, Brazil, Spain and Hong Kong. Interstate distinguishes itself with key industry certifications, including ISO 9001:2008.
The Challenge
For years, Interstate had used HP 3000 servers, but the firm’s IT staff was concerned with disaster planning and recovery. In addition, Interstate was growing so rapidly that performing maintenance, updates and configurations on the nearly 220 desktops and 30 servers in its Washington Metropolitan area locations were becoming time consuming for the three-person IT staff.
“We really needed redundancy as well as automation for certain IT functions,” says Imran Khalid, Interstate’s System Administrator. “We had purchased some low-end equipment in the past as a stop-gap measure, but it was time to really look at a more long-term, cost-effective solution.”
The Solution
Khalid began considering virtualization as a potential answer, but knew he needed outside expertise and guidance for the project. “I’d heard great things about Nortec, so I asked them to make an assessment.”
Nortec provided recommendations, timelines and budgets that would accomplish Interstate’s goals. Nortec suggested Site Recovery Manager because it’s easy to implement and maintain. “Since we don’t have a big on-site staff, it was essential to have something we could do easily ourselves,” says Khalid.
Benefits
Interstate now has the redundancy it needs and Khalid has the peace of mind knowing that if any of its hosts goes down, the company’s data is preserved and easily available. It’s also improved efficiency. “Anything we used to do in hours now takes just minutes,” says Khalid. “But the ease of use is perhaps the biggest benefit. Anyone on our staff can easily fail over if needed, and that makes me rest easy.”