Heat and Control, Inc. ("Heat and Control") is one of the world's leading manufacturers of food processing and packaging equipment. Headquartered in Hayward, California, Heat and Control serves its customers with easily accessible sales, manufacturing and product support services from local offices around the world. Heat and Control originally engaged INX to virtualize its production data center in Hayward along with four of its larger remote facilities. Virtualizing its data centers enabled Heat & Control to obtain high availability for its production servers without requiring expensive clustering software. Establishing a formal disaster recovery ("DR") solution was the logical next step.

Heat and Control considered hosting its own DR solution in one of its own remote data centers, but the cost of equipping and managing the facility was higher than INX's outsourcing option. Heat and Control consequently turned to INX’s Virtual Infrastructure Recovery Service® (VRS) in order to provide a DR service based upon its VMware virtualization environment.

“After analyzing the cost involved in providing an internal DR solution, it was quickly evident that the economics of INX’s hosted service were far more favorable”, said Wen Chang, CIO of Heat and Control. “In fact, we saved enough money by virtualizing our production environment to much more than offset INX monthly fees for hosting our DR service, and INX handles all of the disaster recovery management on a 24 X 7 basis. An additional advantage of a hosted solution is that we further help reduce carbon emissions by not having equipment dedicated to disaster recovery that does nothing but consume power unless we are testing or in use in the unlikely event of a disaster.”

“Heat and Control was one of the charter users of our server recycling program,” said Steve Kaplan, Vice President of Data Center Virtualization for INX. “They donated scores of repurposed servers that we in turn provided to charities. We estimate that by virtualizing 60 servers in their primary data center, Heat and Control eliminated 300 tons of annual CO2 emissions, and will save over $50,000 in annual energy costs alone.

The disaster recovery system that INX designed will replicate the Heat and Control datacenter through the Internet – not only stored data, but the servers themselves which are now "virtual" servers using VMware's virtualization software. INX utilized technologies from Data Domain and esXpress to accomplish very efficient replication. INX’s VRS also includes virtual desktops so that in the event of a disaster, Heat and Control employees can access their desktops, applications and data from anywhere they can get to a browser.

Mark Hilz, President of INX commented, “Our Virtual Infrastructure Recovery Service® is hosted out of a Class IV rated data center in Northern California and includes top quality equipment and software. By always maintaining adequate resources to cover a disaster in any particular geographic region, we are able to leverage our resources for our clients across the country. This means that we can provide a fully managed service for less money than our clients would need to spend just on collocation facilities and equipment.”