The Neenan Company and NexCore Group Improve Disaster Recovery with SimpliVity’s OmniCube

The Neenan Company and NexCore Group, both operating in the construction and real estate industries, were facing challenges with their existing disaster recovery methods. As the quantity of data grew between the two businesses, so too did the disaster recovery requirements within their data centers. They were in constant danger of a crippling hardware failure, which could result in downtime up to, and even exceeding, 48 hours depending upon how many hard disks were damaged. In addition to the serious recovery-time disadvantage, both companies had significant concerns regarding natural disasters and potential damage to the physical equipment within the data centers. Given the weekly tape pick-up cycle, they were seeking a better system that did not risk an entire week’s worth of work. While improving both companies’ disaster recovery capabilities was a top priority, they also saw an opportunity to conduct a technology refresh of the two data centers and leverage a new solution to reduce annual maintenance and operating expenses.

The Neenan Company is a fully integrated design-build firm located in Fort Collins, Colorado. It has a small IT team of three professionals responsible for protecting all 40 of the mission critical virtual machines (VMs) that keep the business running each day. Applications such as CMiC construction and project management software powered by Oracle 10g, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint, AutoDesk Revit, and collaboration software running on multiple Microsoft Remote Desktop Services app servers mean that comprehensive, efficient disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity is a top priority for The Neenan Company’s IT team. NexCore Group, a partner of the The Neenan Company, is a healthcare real estate development, acquisition, and management company located in Denver, Colorado. Despite having less storage needs, NexCore Group manages a lot of the same mission-critical applications as its partner firm and places the same amount of emphasis on protecting itself from data loss or business downtime.