Find Your Managed Services Niche
By The Business Solutions Network
An MSP performs a $350,000 network infrastructure, virtualization, and off-site replication install for a media production company with high-availability and capacity needs.
Everyone loves the recurring revenue that comes from managed services contracts where you’re playing the part of virtual CIO, but there’s also the project-based revenue that can come as the result of your trusted advisor status. Such was the case when Greystone Technology was approached by one of its clients in need of a major IT overhaul.
Travis Hankins, VP of IT consulting for Greystone, says that his customer, Event Networks (ENI), provides a one-stop solution for clients requiring media production and ad distribution. “As ENI has continued to expand their service offerings to more clients, including Fortune 500 companies, they realized that their server and network infrastructure was the bottleneck for the success of their business,” he says. They approached the MSP to discuss their options. After a short evaluation of different solutions providers, ENI quickly realized they had the expertise they needed with Greystone.
Hankins and team met with ENI and proposed a high-availability solution that would be capable of supporting ENI in the larger markets they were striving to enter. The solution was built around the idea of providing ENI a hardware solution that would not only sufficiently support its existing around-the-clock media production, but also allow its business to grow over the next five to six years.
Solve The Unique Challenges Of Your Customers
For the IT upgrade, the MSP selected and installed a variety of networking infrastructure and storage devices. Installed were two Dell SonicWALL NSAs, two Dell PowerEdge r720 servers with 768 GBs of RAM and dual 12 core processors, six Dell Power Connect switches, two Dell EqualLogic 6200 SANs, and one Dell EqualLogic 6210 SAN for off-site replication. 
Additionally, Greystone installed VMWare Enterprise with Ops Management, which allows the MSP to actively monitor ENI’s virtualized environment and quickly predict issues with hardware or configurations that may have had a negative impact on ENI’s experience. The total cost of the solution to ENI was approximately $350,000.
One challenge with the upgrade was due to ENI’s working hours. “ENI currently operates 24 hours a day and needed access to all resources during that time,” says Hankins. “This proposed a challenge for our team as we needed to ensure that the implementation process didn’t hinder the employee’s ability to work and complete projects with their clients. Implementation had to be seamless without network downtime. We also worked closely with the management team at ENI to redesign their entire server room, expanding the size of the space by 200 percent, installing multiple one-ton A/C units and a state of the art fire suppression system that, if deployed, would not damage the technology in place.
“The proposed solution allowed for no single point of failure within the network or server infrastructure as well as allowing ENI to have an off-site replication of their entire virtualized environment,” explains Hankins. Since ENI works with so many large files, backups aren’t as simple as creating a nightly unattended job. Having employees working at all hours of the day, with the potential that bandwidth could be tied up for any number of customer-related jobs, Greystone works closely with the media company to manually perform off-site replication when the time is right. While this might fly in the face of the typical managed services goal of streamlining systems, it shows how a good MSP will take whatever steps are necessary to address its client’s needs.
The new infrastructure allows ENI users to work on a full 10 GBPs network with the dedicated resources needed within the server infrastructure to process files that could grow larger than 100 GBs in size. In the end, the upgrade has allowed ENI to complete more projects faster.
Hankins says that since the ENI project, the MSP has worked with many other clients in industries such as oil and gas, enterprise software, surveillance, and animation that are similar to ENI in that they have high-availability and high-capacity needs.