The
Coughlan Companies, a Minnesota-based holding company, is the latest
enterprise to transform its remote office IT with SimpliVity’s leading
hyperconverged infrastructure, the only hyperconverged solution that
assimilates all IT below the hypervisor. After replacing its legacy IT
systems with SimpliVity’s solution, the Coughlan Companies:
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Achieved incredible data capacity savings as high as 896:1 through
inline deduplication, compression, and optimization
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Improved data protection processes, enabling backup and restore in
seconds, rather than hours or days
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Increased performance for mission-critical applications, including
Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP, by 20 percent in pre-production
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Drove operational changes that increased productivity and
significantly reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) of the IT
infrastructure
“Prior to standardizing on the SimpliVity solution, we were spending 80%
of our time working on day-to-day IT administration and only 20% working
on strategic architectural projects,” said Brett Hoerner, manager of
infrastructure and support services, Coughlan Companies. “Now it’s
flipped. Today, I have a single engineer responsible for day-to-day
operations of all compute and storage resources at the branch offices
and the data center, with the in-house skills and ability to back-fill
as needed. This allows us to spend the majority of our time innovating
and driving key business initiatives. SimpliVity’s hyperconverged
infrastructure has completely transformed how we operate IT at Coughlan.”
The Coughlan Companies manages its entire multinational presence from a
central data center in Minnesota – including four remote offices
throughout the U.S. and the U.K. Prior to SimpliVity, the company’s
distributed multivendor IT environment had become increasingly
inefficient, risky and costly to operate. The company decided to embark
on a project to refresh and standardize its remote office infrastructure
to streamline operations, improve performance and mitigate risks.
After receiving outstanding results with SimpliVity for their remote
office project, the Coughlan Companies executed an enterprise-wide
Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP implementation on SimpliVity's hyperconverged
solution. The in-house deployment model offered significant TCO and
performance advantages over their legacy infrastructure and cloud-based
alternatives.
SimpliVity's
hyperconverged infrastructure consolidated all core IT functions for
Coughlan Companies—including compute, storage, network switching,
replication, and backup—onto industry-standard x86 hardware. The company
replaced multiple servers and storage systems at each remote site with a
single 2U SimpliVity system. The central operations team manages the
enterprise-wide implementation in a uniform manner using VMware vCenter.
“With SimpliVity, Coughlan Companies enjoys the best of both worlds:
cloud economics with enterprise-grade data protection and efficiency,
performance, and global unified management,” said Mitch Breen, senior
vice president, global sales at SimpliVity. “SimpliVity’s hyperconverged
infrastructure helps Coughlan eliminate operational expenses and
complexity, while providing a solid foundation for future applications
and data growth.”