Instant-Capacity xSeries BladeCenter Consolidation & Disaster Recovery Solution with Virtualization Cultivates More Fertile Business Ground for FCS America

Through rich industry expertise and effective benchmark/analysis tools, MSI Systems Integrators (MSI) has helped Farm Credit Services of America (FCS America) significantly cut IT costs and gain a technology kick start over its competitors. The results have been tremendous in terms of on demand procurement to support rapid growth; physical space and budget savings; disaster recovery; and overall customer service enhancements.

"MSI has impressed me with their ability to provide realistic descriptions of what they can and will do. Then, they follow through and do it as promised. The more I work with MSI, the better I like them." - Dan Wagner
Director - Systems Administration
Farm Credit Services of America

The Challenges

Early in 2005, FCS America realized its IT environment simply could not support the company's projected 12.5-percent growth. Adding capacity to the environment took weeks. Concerns over properly cooling FCS America's 118 servers posed a risk of losing 95 percent of its business during a single outage. The business concern for this was: if the power was to go out, or if the facility's air conditioners couldn't keep up, FCS America would risk losing use of its servers. FCS America's Intel-based servers are necessary to delivering mission-critical applications. Without prompt turnaround of these offerings, FCS America's competition could beat them to the punch. Concern worsened when at one point the server room temperature rose to over 100 degrees after only one hour of an air conditioning outage.

Based on the skills and abilities MSI brought to the table during a previous project, FCS America chose MSI to analyze its disaster recovery situation and evaluate the notion of consolidating its more than 40 Intel®-based Dell® servers to a virtualized IBM® xSeries® BladeCenter® environment.

The MSI Solution

MSI used several key tactics to fully understand FCS America's server consolidation needs and help the customer realize the benefits of a virtualized BladeCenter / VMware ®. These included:

• Hold briefings at MSI's state-of-the-art Technology Enablement Center ™ (TEC);
• Inviting FCS America to visit a recent successful BladeCenter installation at First National Bank of Omaha; and
• Create an "on demand" capability to assure optimum responsiveness, while constraining TCO.

The initial briefing was held in January of 2005, with the CDAT study wrapping up in March. MSI then completed implementation of both live and backup sites by June of 2005. FCS America benefited from the documented study and, to this day, the IT team uses the CDAT results to benchmark systems progress on an ongoing basis as new business requirements sprout. These tactics gave FCS America a clear and speedy way to evaluate the solution in terms of disaster recovery, minimizing the time and opportunities lost by the old environment.

Having expressed concerns with cooling through the calibrated vectorized system, FCS America wanted to use blowers as opposed to individual fans on the server Blades. MSI took the proposed solution even further to reveal that, of FCS America's 118 servers, 80 were candidates for virtualization. MSI then recommended IBM BladeServer, VMware and IBM Director to replace the 40 Dell servers for a more on demand, cost-effective and fail-safe environment.

In addition, MSI provided FCS America with seamless, "one-number-to-call" services by teaming with IBM to provide a support contract on all hardware, IBM Director, Windows® and VMware instances. MSI also worked directly with VMware to offer the virtualization component of the solution, which allows the client to virtually replace its existing servers as they come off contract without any additional investment. Implementation was done completely by MSI staff following extensive training and certification through IBM and VMware programs.

The Benefits

FCS America no longer has to be concerned with risking daily business losses of potentially up to 95 percent. The on demand solution stamped out the high-risk disaster potential of cooling problems in the server room and created more space for monitoring and growing where they really needed it. By consolidating the 118 servers, FCS America no longer needs to build a new facility for its continuous server purchases.

In addition, the new BladeCenter platform keeps FCS America on task to achieve its 12.5-percent business growth rate. The customer can now add needed capacity within a day, rather than the two weeks typical of the previous configuration. This benefit is huge to FCS America's administrators:

"With the VMware Blade, it is amazing to have instant capacity," Wagner said. "For example, if 14 servers are needed for utilization, I can easily respond with, 'Sure, we can do that by tomorrow,' when it used to take two weeks and include a rack analysis, reevaluation of power, and utility folks coming to our site to reconfigure. I no longer buy servers when we need them because this solution gives us on demand capacity."

The solution also provides real-time information on demand. FCS America's ability to deliver systems quickly with very high availability is enabling better customer service. These systems are being used to revolutionize the credit approval process to reduce the approval time of loans from several days to seconds. The improved credit approval process is a differentiating factor for customers who are serviced more quickly and efficiently than the competition. Together these solutions are solidifying FCS America's position as a market leader in its primary and secondary markets.

For additional information on how MSI Systems Integrators can help your organization, contact us at 800.640.4674 or visit our website at www.msiinet.com.

This MSI solution is featured in VARBusiness magazine's annual State of the Market issue published November 28, 2005 as "VAR of the Year" in the Customer Return-on-Investment category.