IT pro rethinks infrastructure from the ground up, ends up in clouds

04.04.2012

We have a lot of UCS chassis installed. As far as the actual migration, we're about 75% done. So that's why we feel confident at this point that we're seeing the returns that we've spec'd out. It's working quite well, and I'm very pleasantly surprised at just how far we can go. We started this project expecting to go from 10 to six data centers. But as we looked closely at it and at some of the redundancies we could eliminate, it became apparent we could go from 10 to four. We can't go much farther below four because we have to keep an international presence and everybody has to have a DR site, so it was kind of the bare minimum.

Any reservations about going with Cisco given they are relatively new to the whole server game?

There was. It's Cisco, so you have a big name backing it, you feel comfortable from a financial perspective. But to your point, they were a recent entry into the server market and companies like HP and Dell have a pedigree there. From a HireRight perspective we sat back and said, prove it to us. There had been a lot of wins for Cisco in the bigger hosting spaces, but I wanted to actually see it. So we went through several months' worth of design and then site visits, having them show us what the capabilities are.

It took a little bit of getting our head around the benefits of some of the virtual profiles. There are a lot of things you can do that, I'll be frank, out of the gate, were a little bit puzzling to some engineers that had worked in the traditional space. But to their credit, Cisco had an endless amount of patience. And then before we go live with any data center we do pre-flight testing. I joke with the engineers that it's a lot like when you build a plane. Eventually at some point Boeing has to put a team of engineers and a pilot on that plane and say -- good luck, we'll see you when it gets back.

But to answer your question, it took some convincing. But I am very happy with the decision we made.