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

04.04.2012

Some. We do a lot of our own internal development, so for the core applications, the CRM tools, the workflow management tools, some of the stuff we use for internal processes, we've written them ourselves and did the consolidation in the process so we really didn't have to streamline those much.

So where do you stand in your goal to get down to four data centers?

We're 75% done, so we're moving right along on that. It's going quite well. We have primary data centers in the U.S. and the U.K. that are both built and complete, and two DR sites behind that. So we actually are quite literally just at that point where we fire up a couple more blades, provision the storage, move the apps and decommission the old. So a lot of lessons learned, but it's gone pretty smooth.

How do you use the DR sites?

We use the secondary sites as replication sites for real-time data replication.