Eliminating IT operations expense and complexity for remote offices

After replacing its legacy IT systems with SimpliVity’s solution, the Coughlan Companies:

· Achieved incredible data capacity savings as high as 896:1 through inline deduplication, compression, and optimization
· Improved data protection processes, enabling backup and restore in seconds, rather than hours or days
· Increased performance for mission-critical applications, including Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP, by 20 percent in pre-production
· Drove operational changes that increased productivity and significantly reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) of the IT infrastructure

“Prior to standardizing on the SimpliVity solution, we were spending 80% of our time working on day-to-day IT administration and only 20% working on strategic architectural projects,” said Brett Hoerner, manager of infrastructure and support services, Coughlan Companies. “Now it’s flipped. Today, I have a single engineer responsible for day-to-day operations of all compute and storage resources at the branch offices and the data center, with the in-house skills and ability to back-fill as needed. This allows us to spend the majority of our time innovating and driving key business initiatives. SimpliVity’s hyperconverged infrastructure has completely transformed how we operate IT at Coughlan.”

The Coughlan Companies manages its entire multinational presence from a central data center in Minnesota – including four remote offices throughout the U.S. and the U.K. Prior to SimpliVity, the company’s distributed multivendor IT environment had become increasingly inefficient, risky and costly to operate. The company decided to embark on a project to refresh and standardize its remote office infrastructure to streamline operations, improve performance and mitigate risks.

After receiving outstanding results with SimpliVity for their remote office project, the Coughlan Companies executed an enterprise-wide Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP implementation on SimpliVity's hyperconverged solution. The in-house deployment model offered significant TCO and performance advantages over their legacy infrastructure and cloud-based alternatives.

SimpliVity's hyperconverged infrastructure consolidated all core IT functions for Coughlan Companies—including compute, storage, network switching, replication, and backup—onto industry-standard x86 hardware. The company replaced multiple servers and storage systems at each remote site with a single 2U SimpliVity system. The central operations team manages the enterprise-wide implementation in a uniform manner using VMware vCenter.

“With SimpliVity, Coughlan Companies enjoys the best of both worlds: cloud economics with enterprise-grade data protection and efficiency, performance, and global unified management,” said Mitch Breen, senior vice president, global sales at SimpliVity. “SimpliVity’s hyperconverged infrastructure helps Coughlan eliminate operational expenses and complexity, while providing a solid foundation for future applications and data growth.”