Growing pains are part of any successful business. For a 250-user marketing data company based in the western U.S., rapid growth translated into a significant problem — running out of space for all of that data. As the company prepared to move into a new office, the IT team had an opportunity to build a new data center, and they discovered the advantages of open networking.
The company’s data center director and senior network administrator called MicroAge’s Mike LaPorta for help in developing a strategic solution.
“The company has more than doubled in size over the past three to five years,” Mike says. “Because they’re growing so fast, the IT team wanted to make sure we built this data center with the future in mind.”
Open Networking
The client quickly fell in love with Cumulus Networks for networking and switches. That’s because Cumulus provides an open network OS (Cumulus Linux) — allowing you to use any of more than 50 open source-friendly hardware partners.
After a week of complimentary training, the client was sold on the benefits of Cumulus Express, which gave the client high-performance switching hardware and open networking software that they would be able to get up and running quickly — all for less than other solutions.
Cumulus Express boasts a simple, all-in-one approach to deployment by delivering high-performance web-scale networking efficiencies.
Spine-Leaf Architecture
As the company designed its new data center, it wanted to look beyond the traditional three-layer approach. The IT team saw value in a more modern model — spine-leaf architecture. The spine-leaf approach lets IT teams optimize their data centers so they can more readily benefit from software-defined and cloud models in order to distribute workloads to virtual machines.
Cumulus Networks is focused on bringing web-scale networking to enterprise cloud — encouraging businesses to embrace open and modular networks that are scalable and efficient. Cumulus allows organizations to affordably build and efficiently operate networks.
The ability to use Cumulus with switches from their old environment, and adding more hardware as needed, made a compelling financial argument. Other pieces of the new data center included Tripp Lite UPSes and racks, Meraki MS350 48PT switches and access points, HGST Ultrastar SN200 Series PCIe SSDs and the SonicWall SuperMassive 9200 Series security appliance.
Outstanding experiences with Cumulus support cemented the client’s confidence that they made the right decision.
“They are absolutely loving the support they’re getting from Cumulus,” Mike says.
As the company has settled into its new space and new data center, the IT team is happy with their decision. “They have the performance they need, and saved a lot of money,” Mike says. “Plus, they were able to plan for the future.”
