Orif Fortifies Its Training Programs with Cisco HyperFlex Edge and Cisco Intersight Case Study
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Orif is a nonprofit organization in French-speaking Switzerland focused on the socio-professional integration of people with illnesses or disabilities. Working in collaboration with socio-economic partners, Orif creates structures and programs that provide specialized guidance, skills development, and vocational training. For more information, visit www.orif.ch.
| Executive Summary |
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| Customer Name: Orif Industry: Nonprofit Location: 10 sites in French-speaking Switzerland Number of Employees: 500 |
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| Challenges |
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Improve availability of mission-critical systems and teaching tools
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Simplify and accelerate internal operations
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Streamline IT consumption and costs
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| Solution |
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Hyperconverged infrastructure with cloud-based management
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| Results |
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Reduced recovery time and recovery point objective (RTO/RPO) from 24 hours to 15 minutes
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Accelerated application performance and data access by 20 to 30 percent
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Reduced server provisioning time from one hour to 10 minutes
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Challenge: Minimize downtime to avoid class cancellations
In addition to supporting internal applications and operations, Orif’s two data centers are at the heart of the nonprofit’s training and education programs. If the data centers go offline, Orif’s ability to help people is immediately hamstrung.
“We are a training center with 10 locations in French-speaking Switzerland,” says Didier Delessert, systems engineer at Orif. “If our servers go down, we don’t have access to the necessary training materials and have to cancel classes.”
A storage system crash that ground Orif’s operations to a halt for an entire day prompted a review of the nonprofit’s data center infrastructure and disaster recovery plan (DRP).
“Our previous DRP had a relatively long recovery time and recovery point objective (RTO/RPO), almost 24 hours,” Didier Delessert explains. “To minimize downtime and avoid class cancellations, we wanted to get it down to 15 minutes.”
After evaluating more than a dozen solutions, Orif chose Cisco® HyperFlex™ Edge, which brings the robust feature set and simplicity of Cisco HyperFlex systems to edge and distributed computing environments.
“Cisco HyperFlex Edge really excelled and caught our attention,” Didier Delessert says. “It was the only solution that could meet our RPO and RTO requirements, and the pricing was also a pleasant surprise.”
“Cisco HyperFlex Edge really excelled and caught our attention. It was the only solution that could meet our RPO and RTO requirements, and the pricing was also a pleasant surprise.”
Didier Delessert, Systems Engineer, Orif
The new infrastructure has accelerated application performance and data access by 20 to 30 percent. More importantly, it allowed Orif to integrate its two data centers and establish asynchronous replication. In the event of a problem, failover is fast and seamless.
“Previously, we had to restore from backup, which took us at least half a day just for the storage. Then we had to reconnect the servers, restore access, and check everything,” Didier Delessert recalls. “Now, if one of the data centers goes down, we just fire up the HyperFlex servers at the other site, relaunch the main servers, and we’re back online within 10 to 15 minutes.”
Orif hasn’t experienced any problems with its new infrastructure, thanks in part to the ongoing support it receives from Groupe T2i and the Cisco Technology Assistance Center (TAC).
“Groupe T2i helped us with installation and configuration, and the project went very smoothly,” Didier Delessert says. “Having a trusted IT partner like Groupe T2i and behind-the-scenes support from Cisco are very important. We haven’t faced any issues yet, but I know we’re in good hands if something does occur.”
In addition to fortifying Orif’s training and education programs, the new infrastructure has also streamlined the nonprofit’s IT costs and operations. Data center electricity consumption has been reduced by roughly 20 percent, and systems provisioning has been accelerated by an order of magnitude.
“It used to take us an hour to provision a virtual machine, now it takes five to 10 minutes,” Didier Delessert notes. “When you consider the time required to set up database, test, and production instances, we’re saving three or four hours every time a new server is requested.”
Orif’s two data centers are now managed with Cisco Intersight™. According to Didier Delessert, the cloud-based service has improved systems visibility and simplified infrastructure updates and orchestration.
“We used to have separate tools for each hardware and software component, which was a pain from operational and troubleshooting standpoints,” he says. “Now Cisco Intersight handles everything. It aligns with all of the hardware and software, validates firmware updates, and tests compatibility to avoid integration problems. It only takes us three mouse clicks to update the entire environment.”
Groupe T2i provides digital transformation software and services that improve the management of documents, human resources, infrastructure, and cloud. With strong expertise in the areas of networking, storage, servers, and intelligent management solutions, Groupe T2i helps its customers deploy their infrastructure and optimize their IT operations. For more information, visit optimisation-it.groupe-t2i.ch.
“Groupe T2i helped us with installation and configuration, and the project went very smoothly. Having a trusted IT partner like Groupe T2i and behind-the-scenes support from Cisco are very important.”
Didier Delessert, Systems Engineer, Orif
Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service
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