Situation and Objectives

RPG Consultants, offering full-service administration, recordkeeping and consulting for retirement and benefit plans, has approximately 20 employees with several locations in multiple counties. RPG worked with a few IT service providers as their IT infrastructure grew. The managing partner of the firm, Evan Rapp, is tech savvy and kept up to date on the latest technologies. Over the years they have built a complex IT environment utilizing Exchange server, Terminal server, as well as custom applications that help streamline operations. Mr. Rapp knew it was time to upgrade and make changes to their infrastructure to help with backup and disaster recovery.

Methodology

A previous IT support company had setup the original IT infrastructure and others had upgraded and made changes over time. At this point they had two physical servers running all their applications. Knowing that server availably was a major concern, Helix Systems recommend using VMware ESXi to virtualize the environment. We recognized that the server hardware was fairly new and that we could leverage the power of virtualization to consolidate the entire environment on the one physical server and utilize the other server for testing and restoration purposes.

Results

By utilizing VMware to host five servers on one physical "machine", we were able to provide high availability without buying any additional hardware. For fast and seamless backups we implemented Acronis True Image Enterprise Server. This allowed us to create full systems images that could be taken offsite and restored to any server. In fact, Mr. Rapp was pleased about the fact that he can have his entire environment "in his pocket and off-site" on a USB hard drive ready to be restored in case of a disaster.

Client Satisfaction

«Helix Systems is a pleasure to work with. They provided a flat rate to complete the project and worked around our schedules (including weekends and evenings) to accommodate us.» Evan Rapp, Managing Partner

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