Accommodating continuing growth through public cloud

The challenge

Fast-growing business seeks to eliminate technology growing pains with hybrid IT and DR 

ProMach is a successful manufacturing business in acquisition mode. The company completed five acquisitions within a 12-month period and, within just two years, doubled both its top-line revenue and employee headcount. This exponential growth resulted in both growing pains and a number of IT infrastructure challenges, including an increasingly strained production environment that housed the company’s missioncritical business applications.

When it became clear to the company that it could no longer meet its IT infrastructure needs on its own, ProMach sought a partner that could help it develop and implement a strategy to accommodate growth. That strategy would ultimately include working with a service provider to host and manage a hybrid production environment. It also required a geographically diverse DR solution to mitigate downtime and allow for a seamless failover, should the production environment be disrupted. ProMach asked its long-time consultant, Interlink, to assist its executives in finding the best option for an IT infrastructure solution provider that could meet its specific needs. The consultant’s search process began with an analysis of ProMach’s existing data center provider, followed by the development of specifications and requirements for the company’s desired production environment. An RFP was developed and sent out to various potential providers. The big question was: Would any of the respondents be able to fully meet ProMach’s needs? —needs that would likely change as the company continued to grow.

The solution

Meticulous migration and a solid DR solution help facilitate future business plans 

Flexential responded to the RFP that Interlink developed and, after extensive review and vetting by Interlink, was selected as one the top two providers. The next step was for the Flexential sales and engineering teams to sit down with the ProMach executives and discuss the company’s current needs, as well as where ProMach was headed in the next 12 to 14 months. The Flexential team wanted to make sure they could propose a solution that would accommodate the company’s growth and evolving strategic goals going forward. When the Flexential team shared its capabilities and depth of expertise, ProMach was impressed with the Flexential Cloud platform, which delivered a secure, dedicated, non-oversubscribed production environment. The company also liked that Flexential offered a number of geographically diverse, enterprise-class data centers that allow for a solid, reliable DR solution. Because downtime could have a significant, negative impact on ProMach’s business, Flexential’s uptime and high availability was also a plus. ProMach signed on with Flexential for its public cloud and Recovery Cloud services. The ProMach team also chose to utilize Flexential managed security services, secure cloud storage and off-site data storage to further minimize potential data loss and maintain appropriate data access. The challenge of finding the right solution was overcome, but next up was migrating to a new provider. ProMach had a highly complex IT environment, so the migration from its previous provider had lots of moving parts. Flexential handled it with extreme care. There was a dedicated Flexential team overseeing the implementation, from start to finish. Flexential remained in constant communication with ProMach, so the company was always apprised of project status. The migration was completed with no impact to production.

The results

Increased business growth with a flexible public cloud solution and protected production environment 

Today, ProMach utilizes the Flexential public cloud to house its mission-critical business applications. The Flexential public cloud is a fully hosted cloud solution that delivers compute infrastructure from scalable, enterprise-class, multi-tenant clusters. The hosted cluster environment provides customized, seamless scaling for each unique customer and flexibly supports temporary demand spikes without the need for permanent investment. Flexential also implemented a DR solution using its Recovery Cloud and footprint of geographically diverse data centers. Built on leading-edge technologies and drawing upon Flexential expertise in cloud-based DR, the Flexential Recovery Cloud enables customers to take advantage of the reduced costs associated with multi-tenancy while accessing the necessary cloud resources to restore services in the event of a site failure—quickly, securely and regardless of the location of their production environment. ProMach continues to evolve, confident it has an IT service provider and partner to help smooth the way for future growth.