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Acsys Interactive Lowers Hardware Costs while Expanding Storage Capacity with agámi Information Server |
The Customer
In this increasingly virtual world, people need interactive experiences in order to engage and connect effectively with information, services and products. Acsys Interactive helps organizations create unprecedented interactive experiences.
The award-winning firm provides expertise in strategy and research, technology, project management, design, eMarketing and hosting for companies across multiple verticals—including consumer-direct, financial services, healthcare, education, insurance and manufacturing—helping organizations harness scalable technology to be more efficient, innovative and profitable.
The Challenge
Hosting is an increasingly growing part of Acsys’ business. To that end, the firm promises relentless reliability. "In the glamorous rock-and-roll world of interactive marketing and communications, hosting is the roadie—the glue that holds the show together…Everyone needs a reliable roadie," the firm’s website states.  As the company’s shared and collocated hosting business expanded, so did the responsibilities of its Information Technology staff. Two full-time IT staff members managed 40 physical servers for all internal IT and communications, and remote hosting for clients. Beyond high maintenance requirements and hardware costs, IT encountered a number of other challenges due to the lack of virtualized, networked storage: • Maintenance windows impacted availability
• There were potential single points of failure
• Recovery could take as long as a full day
• It required days to deploy new client applications
• Storage capacity and connectivity were limited
To enhance availability and maintain high levels of client service, Acsys looked to move away from server-based storage toward virtualization and database clustering.
agámi Solution Acsys evaluated several storage options before selecting the agámi Information Server 3006. The enterprise-class unified network storage solution, with 6TB of capacity, concurrently supports file-based and block-based storage on one platform while providing high levels of performance, data protection and reliability, enterprise-class functionality, and scalability.
"agámi offered a good price point and flexible iSCSI," said David Fusfeld, infrastructure manager at Acsys. "Being a hybrid solution, it offered significantly higher flexibility than the others we looked at."
Within just a couple of hours, the firm’s IT team of two installed the Information Server on its own—a surprisingly easy setup out of the box. "We were impressed by the ease of installation," Fusfeld said. "Combined with our virtualized hosting environment, we are now able to bring new systems
online rapidly. We’re able to respond to increased demand and effectively double or triple customers hosting capacity in a matter of only a couple of hours."
IT easily allocates and partitions the disk via a web-based GUI. From a single view, IT members can manage storage, as well as monitor the health of the network.
Now, Acsys operates with 35 physical servers, instead of 40, and with 66 new virtualized servers. They primarily run up to nine content management products concurrently on the agámi Information Server. Software products are now clustered to enable around-the-clock operations and continuous availability.
"The ability for us to have a clustered solution is huge," Fusfeld said. "Everything is very redundant now, and we’re able to achieve tremendous uptime."
agámi also enhances connectivity with 8 x 1 gigabit Ethernet, and the ability to connect up to 256 iSCSI targets. Hybrid servers and operating systems also connect to the same storage.
Looking forward, IT also plans to leverage an agámi Information Server for data replication and disaster recovery.
Business Benefits With the agámi Information Server, Acsys can now support a number of business objectives more cost effectively.
Consolidated storage with agámi enables the IT team to serve the expanding hosting business without adding staff. Instead of taking days to bring on new systems and applications, it only requires a few hours. Additionally, IT can recover data in less than an hour, instead of a full day. That efficiency helps the team stay focused on supporting client projects.
As needed, Acsys allocates more storage—without having to invest in new hardware. In fact, Acsys upgraded one client to four virtual servers instead of four physical servers, which kept costs down and service levels up. The firm also tripled capacity for another client in one day using virtualization.
More effective storage utilization reduces the firm’s hardware costs, which more than cover the cost of the agámi Information Server. Plus, the firm increases revenue by selling storage space. "We have a good return on investment with agámi because we’re able to sell chunks of space for virtual hosting in increments," Fusfeld said.
Fusfeld also finds that agámi provides an optimized environment for Software as a Service (SaaS). Content and website information management software are database driven, and clustered for high availability. That means better performance on service level agreements for hosted software.
Ultimately, IT is better able to manage and support growth while maintaining the dedicated client service that has defined the firm. "We’re hosting mission-critical information for clients," Fusfeld said. "agámi provides the high availability and performance to ensure reliability, improve service and
security, and pave the way for more follow-on business and revenue."
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