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Case Study
Build Reliability and Security into Your IT Infrastructure
Case Study: Rigel Capital, LLC
The Challenge Provide high degree of availability for critical systems in financial services firm
The Solution VMware technology creates a virtual infrastructure that streamlines IT administration while providing greater availability and redundancy.
VMware at Work VMware Infrastructure 3 Enterprise, featuring:
- ESX Server 3 with VMFS
- VirtualCenter 2
- VMotion
- Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)
- High Availability (HA)
Deployment Environment
- DELL Power Edge 2800 and HP DL360 servers
attached to HP MSA1000 SAN - Guest operating systems: Windows 2003
- Virtualized Production Applications: MS Exchange, MS SQL, Blackberry Enterprise Server, the Advent suite of portfolio management software including the Moxy trading application, DNS, DHCP
- Virtualized Pre-Production Applications: NA
Founded in 1998, Rigel Capital, LLC (Rigel) is an investment management firm headquartered in Seattle, Washington. The company has approximately 25 employees and $2.3 billion in assets under management.
For Rigel, the ability to conduct trades in a timely manner is essential. "You could lose out on thousands of dollars if you fail to execute a trade within a certain window of opportunity," says John Cassidy, manager of IT services at Rigel. "As a result, we need to make sure our IT systems have a high degree of availability and reliability."
Rigel turned to All Covered, a VMware VIP Enterprise Partner, to deliver a solution that could meet its needs. As the only national IT services provider focused on small to medium-sized businesses, All Covered was able to bring an in-depth knowledge of current technologies to Rigel. "We listened closely to understand Rigel's needs," says Laddie Gill, a systems engineering manager at All Covered. "The VMware platform was a perfect match for the challenges that they were seeking to address."
Using VMware Infrastructure 3 as the backbone for its IT infrastructure has allowed Rigel to consolidate multiple single-use physical servers onto just two VMware ESX hypervisors. More importantly, features like VMware HA and VMware Virtual Consolidated Backup give Rigel higher availability and stronger disaster recovery capabilities. "In our line of business, it's hard to put a specific price on those capabilities," says Cassidy. "It's pretty much priceless."
Results- Reduce disaster recovery time from hours to minutes. "Prior to VMware, it
was quite an effort to get three or four servers reinstalled from the ground up—it
could easily take six to eight hours," says Cassidy. "With VMware, it's just a matter of
uploading virtual disk images in a fraction of that amount of time."
- Avoid thousands of dollars in hardware costs. "We didn't initially look at the
VMware solution from a cost-savings perspective, but it's worked out pretty well in
that regard," says Cassidy. "If we need a new server, we can just create a new virtual
machine instead of having to go and spend another $4,000 on a physical server."
- Eliminate cooling issues in server room. "VMware Infrastructure 3 allowed us
to consolidate seven of our physical servers down to just two," says Cassidy.
"It was very important to us to have high availability and to have the ability to recover
quickly in the event of a disaster. VMware Infrastructure 3 made a lot of sense to us
on both those counts.".
– John Cassidy, Manager of IT Services, Rigel Capital
