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RackCorp, a well-known Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, was experiencing rapid growth due to the success of its Content Delivery Network (CDN), CacheCentric. The company's traffic increased by 100-fold over a 12-month period, and its partner program grew by 60 percent. This growth, along with increasing customer demand for server backup and data center services, highlighted the need for greater scalability and accelerated the company's network upgrade timetable. RackCorp maintains a presence in 10 countries and 22 data center Points of Presence (PoPs), each with diverse capabilities for delivering network, dedicated server, virtual server, and cloud services. The company needed to quickly move from 1 Gbps interfaces to 10 Gbps interfaces to keep pace with its growth.

West Carolina Tel, a small rural service provider in South Carolina, was looking to expand its services and increase revenue by delivering superior, high-definition IPTV service to business and residential customers. The company faced stiff competition from cable providers who dominated the television market. To stand out, West Carolina Tel needed to offer better price packages and exceptional High-Definition (HD) TV. The company introduced television services in 2003, which required upgrading and improving the network, and selecting an industry-leading IPTV platform. The company had relied on Brocade® networking solutions for more than a decade and chose Brocade again to support IPTV.

RocketSpace, a San Francisco-based tech accelerator, needed a reliable, flexible, platform-agnostic campus network solution to meet the growing demands of new media and technology companies. The company provides office space to more than 100 new media and technology companies at any given time, offering a multitude of services to keep them on the path to success. The companies sharing the space are growth-focused and require high-speed Internet access, gadget-friendly meeting rooms, ergonomic furniture, and an advanced network that can handle any of their demands. When RocketSpace opened its doors to the public, it inherited an ad hoc campus LAN. The network covered 42,000 square feet of office space, almost 500 desks, and countless mobile devices. The expanding client list pushed the LAN beyond its limits.

The aging Meskwaki network was in sore need of an upgrade. For the last 10 years, the casino had been adding networking infrastructure arbitrarily whenever a bottleneck appeared in the network. The resulting LAN was a mish-mash of products from multiple vendors that consistently experienced performance issues—and kept the 10-person IT team constantly busy. Simple jobs, such as running network usage reports, would take 30 or 45 minutes to complete, and the toll on the network was huge. The hotel’s network was also vulnerable to spam, and there was even one incident of someone spoofing its IP address. Meskwaki needed a complete network overhaul, and Kranig chose Brocade to introduce advanced networking technology throughout the casino property. Kranig and his team wanted to beef up security, address traffic bottlenecks and performance issues, and streamline their switches.

MediaNet Digital, a New York-based company, provides content and technologies that enable brands to offer music and video download and subscription services to their customers. The company stores over a petabyte of digital content in a NAS environment, adding nearly a terabyte of new content every week from content providers. MediaNet Digital tracks consumer transactions via its partners’ Web sites and the company must compile this data into reports. However, the process of generating daily billing and activity reports was becoming increasingly time-consuming and the reliability issues with their storage solution were becoming more problematic as their demands grew. The company also maintains strict Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with its partners, making it crucial to find an advanced, enterprise-class solution.

Population Health Research Institute (PHRI) is a global health research institute that conducts large clinical trials and population studies. The institute is linked to more than 1,500 hospitals or clinical locations in 86 countries. PHRI studies have enrolled more than 1,000,000 participants worldwide, and its Biobank currently stores more than 2.5 million biological samples. The network supports the activities of 10,000 on-campus users and more than 400,000 users around the world. Big Data, such as data associated with population genomics, was pushing the existing network to its limits, and PHRI wants to connect its Big Data analysis capabilities to centralized systems that are run by Compute Canada and funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation. The network supports all of PHRI’s global sites, so it must provide high availability. In the past, PHRI had outsourced its network and its management. The network was based on Cisco equipment that provided 1GbE connections from closet switches to desktops, redundant 1GbE connections to servers, and 4x10GbE uplinks in the core. PHRI needed to increase the performance and load-balancing capabilities of the network while simplifying management so that it could be performed solely by the inhouse ICT team.

Einhell, a leading wholesale supplier of tools and garden products, has been focused on expanding the company internationally since 2002. To provide clients around the globe with optimum service, Einhell needed its new international facilities to operate at the same level as its corporate headquarters. This resulted in the need for a robust and agile IT infrastructure that could meet the company’s growing global demands. As part of its expansion effort, Einhell laid the foundation for an IT system operated from a shared service center based in Landau. The company operates three data centers, two main data centers, and one backup facility. Until recently, their function was to supply services for Einhell in order to relieve pressure from the daily IT business and simultaneously promote homogeneous international IT standards. Today, nearly all of these services are virtualized and therefore require a high-performance infrastructure.

NIKKEI, a leading publisher of business information in Japan, was facing challenges with its storage infrastructure. The company had three separate Storage Area Networks (SANs) for its three core business divisions, each with its own IT staff, budget, and storage devices. This resulted in duplicated management tasks and hardware expenditures. The company realized that consolidating its SANs would streamline administration, enhance IT productivity, and minimize future investments in storage hardware. Additionally, the company was seeking ways to further protect its mission-critical data by implementing a disaster recovery site in Osaka, Japan. However, it wanted to avoid the cost and complexity of separately linking each SAN island to this facility. It believed a single, enterprise-wide connection would be much more economical and practical.

Neos Airlines, based in Milan, Italy, operates flights throughout southern Europe and the world. With 150 employees at its Milan headquarters, and an additional 50 people on 24-hour rotation at Malpensa International Airport, the airline must ensure that all of its staff can readily access mission critical applications. From access to enterprise applications such as e-mail, to applications that enable crews to track airplanes and maintenance teams to inventory and manage spare parts, Neos Airlines employees need to be as mobile as the planes they are operating. The financial impact associated with late plane departures or delays in maintenance can be significant, with downtime costing up to $15,000 per hour for each aircraft in the fleet. Because Neos Airlines’ network supports access to the spare parts database, e-mail, aircraft movements, and Internet access for field engineers, network uptime is essential to both daily operations and the bottom line.

Evangeline Parish School District, serving approximately 6000 students in 12 schools in rural Louisiana, was faced with the challenge of upgrading its network to support upcoming computer-based Common Core testing requirements. The district’s network infrastructure, including the cabling, was outdated, leading to frequent speed, connectivity, and latency problems with both the wired and wireless networks. This resulted in poor application performance and switches dropping users when network traffic peaked. The district also faced issues with aging Cisco wireless equipment, which relied on Power over Ethernet (PoE) injectors, deployed in the ceiling near each access point. The injectors generated heat, which in turn affected the access points and made them unreliable. When problems arose, an IT team member would have to drop everything and drive out to the school, which might be 40 miles away, resulting in lost teaching time.

The University of New Mexico (UNM) is the state’s flagship research institution, injecting millions of dollars into New Mexico’s economy, advancing health care, and augmenting teaching and learning across the state. The university community expects IT to be agile—able to quickly meet new demands and innovate services, whether on campus or in the cloud. However, UNM’s existing network had reached its capacity limits. The IT team had the option of upgrading the line cards and management modules to add capacity. But they decided to look at something new, as financial accountability is critical for them.

Rackspace, a leading managed-cloud company, was facing the challenge of upgrading its SAN infrastructure to better utilize physical facilities, keep pace with growing customer demand, and minimize data center and management complexity. The company's data centers had to handle high data volumes with high performance and zero downtime, as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible. However, the existing architecture required servers and storage to be located in the same area of a data center, leading to unbalanced growth and islands of unused storage and SAN ports. Rackspace wanted to simplify the architecture so that switches, hosts, or storage platforms could be plugged in anywhere, regardless of their physical locations. At the same time, this new architecture had to be able to scale virtual workloads quickly.

HANYS, a nonprofit organization that represents healthcare providers and systems across New York, needed to ensure data protection and business continuity. The organization collects, consolidates, and reports on data at local, regional, and state levels, making data protection crucial for meeting service commitments to members and keeping HANYS’ operations flowing. The organization was also looking for ways to heighten security levels and considered leveraging a SOC 2 compliant data center to enhance its resiliency and security profile. Furthermore, HANYS needed to update its business continuity plan to include a fully redundant hot site for its critical applications and business processes.

Gerber Life Insurance has been growing steadily over the years, and with this growth, its technology requirements have also increased. The company's IT environment, which was once primarily on a mainframe, now includes a distributed infrastructure running dozens of critical applications. These applications power interactions and digital transactions with customers and agents. As the company's business applications became mission-critical, Gerber Life recognized the need for a better disaster recovery plan. The company decided to outsource recovery to a third-party service provider to keep pace with the business.

The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet (KYTC) was looking to enhance its fleet management system to improve fleet data collection and reporting and to maximize asset lifecycles. The KYTC team identified specific goals for the new fleet management system such as improving fleet efficiency, enhancing staff and systems reporting to identify the true fleet condition, improving fuel reporting to include usage and fuel economy, supporting utilization requirements and reassignments, and facilitating replacement scheduling. To accommodate KYTC’s fleet size (11,000+ vehicles and pieces of equipment) and the broad scope of enhancements, the project required specific development activities. In addition, meeting the system specifications required integration with third-party applications. KYTC also needed to manage staff training for 12 highway districts throughout the commonwealth.

The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) manages one of the largest state-owned road networks in the U.S., including more than 50,000 lane miles of roads and 13,063 state highway bridges. The agency wanted to implement a visualization tool within its deployment of AgileAssets® Pavement Analyst™, an advanced pavement management system (PMS) known internally at Caltrans as PaveM. The tool would facilitate the pavement project review process by displaying the relationships between the recommended projects and the currently programmed, under-construction, and as-built projects. Caltrans faced several challenges in developing and implementing the H-Chart project visualization tool. It needed to manage external development of H-Chart with the UCPRC, ensure the tool met specific requirements, and integrate the tool successfully with its PMS to access data for visualization and evaluation.

The Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) was filing insurance claims seeking millions of dollars in infrastructure damage restitution annually. The process for recording and documenting damage claims was very detailed and time-consuming. To calculate the cost of these claims, MnDOT staff members were using data from different IT systems. Detailed damage repair information was not part of the agency’s day-to-day work reporting programs. MnDOT had previously developed a standalone computer application to be used statewide by damage restitution specialists. However, the claim submission process required re-entering the same data up to four times on different forms before the claim could be filed. In addition, without a single source of accurate data, MnDOT was using classification averages to calculate the costs of labor for damaged-property repairs, resulting in reimbursement of only 45% to 60% of the actual labor costs.

DelDOT maintains about 14,000 lane miles of highways, 54 toll lanes, more than 1,700 bridges, and a wide range of other infrastructure assets. The department also oversees the Division of Motor Vehicles and the Delaware Transit Corporation, which operates DART First State, the state’s public transportation provider. To implement the new PMS, DelDOT needed to overcome several challenges. The main challenge was reconfiguring DelDOT’s engineering decision-making framework to take advantage of automated data-collection processes. Another challenge was to address existing limitations in converting raw distress data into deterioration indices. DelDOT also had to develop performance models, treatments, and decision trees to support its new optimization analysis efforts. In addition, the department needed to integrate the new PMS with existing data collection tools and legacy systems. A final challenge was training staff on how to effectively use the new PMS.

The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) manages one of the largest and most heavily traveled road networks in the United States, with 80,444 centerline miles of roadway and 54,180 bridges located in its 25 highway districts. The state sees 197.4 billion annual vehicle miles traveled (VMT) on state-owned highways. Maintaining statewide transportation assets and providing a high-quality road system are vital for the state’s economy and public safety. To contain the costs of managing its road network, TxDOT applies innovative asset lifecycle management strategies to preserve and restore the condition of roadway assets. Texas legislation requires that TxDOT annually provide the state’s Legislative Budget Board and the Governor with a detailed plan for the use of transportation funds. The plan must include pavement condition targets and a district-by-district analysis of how proposed maintenance spending will impact pavement scores.

The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) was managing over 80,000 centerline miles of roads that support more than 500,000,000 daily vehicle miles traveled. The TxDOT pavement program is very large, and it’s growing rapidly to accommodate a fast-growing state population. Beyond the sheer size of its pavement program, TxDOT also faced the challenge of completing the migration from an environment comprised of four standalone applications to a new, comprehensive PMS in a very short time frame. Additional challenges included the need to develop a new Geographic Information System (GIS) module and to train the staff of numerous statewide districts on how to most effectively use the new PMS.

The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) manages a vast network of roadways across 254 counties. In 2011, TxDOT began using AgileAssets® Maintenance Manager™ as its maintenance management system of record. Five years later, the agency moved to advance its asset management practices even further by deploying a state-of-the-art PMS, AgileAssets® Pavement Analyst™. However, these two solutions were implemented as separate systems, leading to a lack of data sharing between pavement management and maintenance management functions. The pavement management staff often lacked up-to-date information about pavement work history and work type. Efficiency lagged due to a lack of coordination between recommended work plans and actual maintenance projects.

NoctisIT, a small managed service provider (MSP) based in Austin, was looking to scale and win clients over larger MSPs. The company's CEO, Jason Whitehurst, identified the need for a virtual CIO role, which would involve managing the client’s entire IT environment. However, this required overhauling and replacing existing processes with best practice tools. The challenge was to find a tool that would allow NoctisIT to manage the client appropriately and understand what devices are in their environment. Another challenge was to effectively and proactively manage his clients’ networks, which would allow NoctisIT to position itself as a business investment rather than a traditional resell strategy.

ITque, a full-service outsourced IT company, was facing the challenge of managing its growing client base without increasing the number of technicians. The company aimed to achieve 65% revenue growth in 2016 by creating streamlined processes and repeatable outcomes. However, the biggest challenge was triaging support issues, funnelling them to the appropriate level of troubleshooting in the fastest amount of time, then solving the issues quickly. Traditional customer complaints about network slowness were particularly challenging to address.

Network Doctor, a managed services provider (MSP), was facing challenges with its existing network monitoring tool. The tool was not providing information about new equipment being added to the network, making it difficult for the company to stay updated on the client's environment. The tool also lacked discovery and initial auditing capabilities, making onboarding a time-consuming process as the team had to physically locate the equipment and manually input all the inventory into their PSA tool, ConnectWise. The company was looking for a solution that could offer more functionality and help them maintain a high level of uptime for their clients.

LAN3, a UK-based systems integrator specializing in networking and cybersecurity, decided to transition from a hardware supplier to a services company. The company already had a service center and skilled staff to offer a fully managed service. However, they lacked the technology systems to ensure their team of 25 could efficiently and profitably deliver on 24/7 service level agreements. They needed a remote monitoring and management system that could provide excellent visibility and assessment of a network, and proactively monitor a range of performance indicators. A cloud-hosted solution was a must, as an operational expense model and guaranteed uptime were high priorities.

XING, a social network for business professionals, was facing a challenge with its existing privilege elevation process. The process was too time-consuming and did not allow for a consistent set of access rights. The company was seeking to improve command elevation from an administrative point of view, as well as establish better auditing features. Furthermore, XING needed to keep in mind a number of regulatory and compliance requirements related to German privacy and related laws. This includes protection of private data, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), as well as other requirements for public companies.

ACME Truck Line’s seven-man tech support team is responsible for 500 employees located throughout the country. Approximately 80% of these employees are located within the company network or are connected to it via VPN, but the remaining 20% are outside the company network. This is a significant segment of the organization. Because the VPN client software issues make up a majority of the issues needing attention, finding an effective remote support solution was critical for the team. While Symantec’s pcAnywhereTM1 could be used to support employees inside of the company firewall, employees outside of the company network had to be supported by phone. This required ACME support reps to relay complex instructions to end-users. Because of the support team’s size and the scope of its responsibilities, on-site visits were often necessary to troubleshoot complex problems and put a strain on its already limited workforce.

The financial institution was facing challenges in validating virtualization security, controlling access, and securely authenticating users. An internal security audit revealed that its VMware ESX systems, Red Hat Linux VM guests, and Solaris systems were configured with file-based methods of user authentication and access control. The staff responsible for user accounts lacked the expertise to manage and synchronize accounts for every type of operating system. The firm was using Active Directory 2003 R2 for its Windows servers. The administrators attempted to implement Active Directory authentication on their ESX hosts by using VMware’s configuration scripts. Although Active Directory’s Kerberos authentication provided single sign on, it provided only part of the desired solution.

Activant’s Eagle product includes a support option in the monthly service fee. Customers have immediate access to a Tier-1 phone support desk that operates in Manila, Philippines. These agents handle minor support issues and customer questions. If the call is not resolved in 10-20 minutes, the call is escalated to the Eagle group – a Tier-2 and up support center – based in Livermore, California. The Tier-2 group either receives phone transfers or calls customers back (depending on SLA). The Tier-2 group is divided into four specialty teams: credit cards, accounting, telecommunications and systems. Calls to this support group are usually complex, says Michelle Sanford, senior product support manager. The average call lasts 22 minutes with the average incident lasting around 57 minutes. Fifty-seven minutes away from a small retail business can be detrimental to customer service at the store level, so Activant knew they needed a way to connect to customers where they could view the screen and speed first call resolution. Activant previously used two remote meeting products, but needed a tool that would actually allow them to support customers.

Antek HealthWare, a healthcare software provider, was facing challenges in providing fast and effective support for its medical office software products. The company was using a client server-based solution, but as the company expanded its client base, it became clear that this type of software was not up to the task of supporting Antek’s nearly 2,000 clients. The clients had to install the software before any support sessions could be initiated, adding to the time and expense of end-user software implementation. In addition, the software required manual configuration of firewalls in order to allow for high-speed connections. In most instances, Antek’s support representatives had to connect to remote clients through dial-up, making the connection extremely slow. This resulted in longer call times and increased frustration among support representatives.