Blog - Dataedge

Campus Network Upgrade

May 7, 2018/in Servers and Networks /by Rob Didlake

Campus Network Upgrade

Our client on this project was a large specialty service and printing company in the Mid-West. They have a campus facility with 4 buildings and are sized at approximately 200 employees.

This client needed to update their network from 1Gbit to 10Gbit for data, IP voice, Wi-Fi and IP video to the campus. The existing network was based upon Cisco routers and switches, but they wanted something that was easier to manage as they were a small staff and didn’t have two people trained to the level that they needed. Other requirements were that there be a reasonable amount of redundancy, Power Over Ethernet to support the variety of connected devices and to keep the solution to a practical cost.

With this criterion in mind we designed the solution leveraging Cisco/Meraki products. The cloud management structure of the Meraki devices allows for them to be easily managed from anywhere, even by a user that isn’t a network expert. They have a perfect combination of ease of use due to the instinctual GUI as well as provide for great control over network traffic with the built-in L7 and attached device analytics. Finally, with the ability to schedule automatic updates of firmware and security patches convinced the staff that this was the perfect product for them.

The physical configuration is based upon two aggregation MS425 switches at the data center with stacked MS225’s at the remote building closets.

The MS225 models chosen included Power Over Ethernet (POE) capability so that separate power did not have to be supplied for video cameras or Wi-Fi units. In addition, the MS225 switches are constructed as stacked devices for redundancy and single switch management. The connection to each endpoint device is 1Gb with 10Gb being used as uplinks to the core switches. All systems at the core (VMware clusters) are attached directly at 10Gb as well.

In the client’s eyes, the Meraki solution created a perfect cloud-based infrastructure providing benefits of:

Fast implementation
Ease of management and monitoring
Firmware updates over the web that include performance improvements, new firmware and security patches
Out of band management architecture meaning all reports, configurations and tools are in the cloud while data stays secure on internal network
All switches configured and monitored via one Dashboard interface.
MS425’s and MS225’s switches utilize physical stacking at each separate location for a better switch to switch throughput and redundancy
Support industry standard OSPF routing
Layer 7 Visibility of network traffic

Large engineering firm looks to Dataedge for backup solution across multiple locations

February 21, 2018/in Multi-location backup solution /by Dataedge

Our client in this example is a large engineering firm with 19 offices and just over 3000 employees. They have two data centers and utilize 500+ guests on VMware for their production servers. The amount of data that needed to be protected for these systems was about 110 TB.

They had a legacy backup system for many years, but it was becoming less friendly due to older technology and the staff that managed it were no longer in that same role. It was doing the job but they found it difficult to administer nor were restores easy.

Outpatient Medical Imaging provider outgrows NAS and steps up to an adaptive flash array

January 22, 2018/in Adaptive flash array, Multi-location backup solution, Nimble /by Dataedge

We met the CIO of a local company at a social event for community business leaders and in conversation, he asked what it is that Dataedge does. When it came to the subject of data storage, he mentioned that his department was looking for additional NAS as they had outgrown their current one. He felt that his hands were tied somewhat in the selection of a solution however because his software provider hadn’t certified very many.

As the discussion went on he described his business as an Outpatient Medical Imaging provider with 14 locations. Each of these locations had multiple modalities, ranging from X-Ray, ultrasound, computed tomography (CT), positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).