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LinearLogic Earns Women-Owned Business Certification |
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LinearLogic has successfully earned WBENC's Women-Owned Business Certification The Women's Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC), founded in 1997, is the largest third-party certifier of businesses owned controlled, and operated by women in the United States. The Women's Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC) is dedicated to advancing the success of Corporate Members, certified women's business enterprises, and government entities in partnership with its Regional Partner Organizations (RPOs). |
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Case Study: Server Virtualization |
The ChallengeA Michigan-based mortgage company needed to rapidly expand to support increasing business requirements. Because of the restrictions placed by the lending market at the time, the company was unable to sustain the purchase of a large amount of capital equipment. A solution was needed that provided the company with the infrastructure it needed and the flexibility to scale and accommodate their growing business needs.
The SolutionLinearLogic provided a solution based on Citrix XenServer. An evaluation was performed that looked into their existing infrastructure to see what could be used moving forward. The company had several high-end servers that had not yet reached the end of their lifecycle, so they were provisioned for high-load applications such as Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server. With the limited budget available, several servers were able to be procured along with some basic shared storage. This allowed the installation of Citrix XenServer, which permitted the rest of the environment, including services such as SharePoint, to be implemented in a virtualized environment.
The BenefitWith a virtualized environment available, the company was able to expand their infrastructure in a controlled manner that permitted them the flexibility they needed in order to meet their business demands. With Citrix XenServer’s memory management capabilities, multiple VMs were able to be provisioned that could provide all of the services required to their end-users while meeting their budget constraints.
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Case Study: Application Virtualization |
The ChallengeA Michigan-based manufacturing company with multiple facilities spread out over the US was running a decentralized network infrastructure that was becoming increasingly disjointed and unmanageable. In many instances, it was easier to physically fax a document between facilities than it was to share it electronically or via email. A complete overhaul was needed in order to provide the company with the capabilities it needed in order to manage their network infrastructure centrally without adding a massive staff overhead.
The SolutionLinearLogic designed and implemented a new network infrastructure featuring MPLS for the connectivity, migration to a centralized data center, and desktop application virtualization using Citrix XenApp. Several of the facilities were connected via point-to-point links that were severely underpowered. A full MPLS infrastructure was designed and put into place that was overlaid on top of their existing WAN, which allowed for data to be moved around more efficiently for migration purposes. The data center was built after determining the appropriate facility to hold it which housed the new infrastructure, including services such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft SharePoint. Desktop applications were handled exclusively by a farm of Citrix XenApp servers. Desktops were kept to a minimum configuration that limited users to accessing applications via XenApp. This permitted the data to be centrally located in the data center where the XenApp servers had the best performance possible for accessing the data.
The BenefitWith the data centralized, backups and other management tasks were able to be performed by a dedicated IT staff that now had the capability of managing the entire infrastructure. By building a cloud-based central infrastructure, desktop maintenance was also kept to a minimum, even reduced to near-zero with the use of Windows-Based Terminals out on the shop floor. With the new MPLS in place, each facility was connected to the others in a fast, efficient manner that encouraged the use of electronic sharing mechanisms.
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Case Study: WAN Accelerators |
The ChallengeA Michigan-based manufacturing company was having difficulty managing data traffic across its 7 facilities. While they had a centralized data center, replication traffic and user data was congesting their MPLS WAN. Management was baffled when increasing bandwidth did not alleviate the issue. A solution was needed that would allow users at remote facilities access to their data in an optimized way.
The SolutionLinearLogic designed and implemented a solution based around Silver Peak WAN Accelerators. After a careful review of the traffic patterns at each facility, it was determined that two types of traffic most affected the user experience, Microsoft Windows sharing and Microsoft Exchange. Voice and Video Conferencing traffic would also need to be included in the QoS policies as well. Silver Peak WAN Accelerators have the ability to analyze traffic, perform QoS, deduplication, and traffic caching in real time as it passes over the WAN links. By implementing a Silver Peak device at the central data center as well as at each facility, traffic could be routed over the tunnels between the Silver Peak devices and optimized in a way that would give the users a LAN-like experience from the remote facilities.
The BenefitAfter several unsuccessful attempts to build a real-time replication solution, the company finally had the ability to provide its end-users a LAN-like experience at all facilities. By providing Silver Peak WAN Accelerators, LinearLogic was able to implement advanced network caching, deduplication, QoS, and traffic shaping across the entire MPLS cloud. Performance improvements were seen across the board as costly bandwidth increases became less urgent. |
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Case Study: Domain Migration |
The ChallengeA nationwide call-center company was merging multiple business units into a single corporate parent. Under the existing environment, each business unit managed its own IT infrastructure running a combination of Windows 2003, Windows 2000, and Windows NT servers. Some units were using Exchange 2003 for email, one was even using Exchange 5.5. The Challenge was to bring together each business unit into a single corporate infrastructure running Windows 2008 and Exchange 2007. Because this was a 24/7 operation, the migration needed to be performed silently, in order to minimize the impact on the users. The SolutionLinearLogic was brought in to design the new infrastructure from scratch. The new infrastructure would be housed in 2 separate datacenters on the east and west coast of the country. This would provide the capability of later implementing disaster recovery and high availability services. The existing member servers were brought online into the new infrastructure with trusts in place so that they could maintain their settings prior to conversion. Using a suite of internally-designed tools, LinearLogic was able to programmatically conduct the simultaneous migration of the users’ mailboxes, their workstations, and their permissions on shared servers in batches of up to 100 at a time during scheduled conversion windows. Once conversion was complete, the users simply needed to log on to the new domain using their existing username and password – all of their desktop settings were maintained and Microsoft Outlook automatically connected to the new Exchange 2007 environment. The BenefitThe Company was now able to maintain their environment from a single security domain. Their IT staff, which was distributed across the country, now had a central point for managing of the entire environment including managing mobile users who frequently traveled between facilities. Because the infrastructure was now housed in centralized data centers, this meant that the requirement of having a large IT footprint at each facility was minimized. Now that everything was under “one roof” routine IT tasks such as software deployments became much more manageable.
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