“We were running on ageing infrastructure that no longer guaranteed agile support, remediation, or reliability.”
Craig Butler, CCC's IT Manager
Campbelltown Catholic Club’s (CCC) story is one of commitment to the community and a desire to uplift the lives of those within it. Founded in the early 1950s by local church members, CCC was created as an extension of their faith and is dedicated to improving the quality of life for everyone in Macarthur through education, sport, and culture.
And when it came to upgrading its legacy servers, the community-focused organisation needed a helping hand from Canon Business Services ANZ’s (CBS) IT infrastructure experts.
Craig Butler, CCC's IT Manager
“Our old servers had reached end-of-support and end-of-life and needed replacing quickly—in fact, one of our servers died at the worst possible time, seriously affecting our point-of-sale operations,” he says. “Without the equipment available to move the server data to, it really affected the way our business operates.”
“While we'd happily worked with CBS in the past, for comparison, we sent an RFP out to a few companies asking them to devise a strategy to replace our servers with minimal disruption to our day-to-day operations,” Craig explains.
“But the solution CBS came back with was the best by far,” he says.
CCC needed to migrate 28x virtual machines and integrate its new VMware ESXi hosts with its existing Center server.
Besides refreshing its legacy IT infrastructure, CCC wanted to improve performance, reduce its infrastructure footprint, increase security, and reduce downtime.
The solution had to be manageable for CCC’s internal IT staff and leverage their skills to reduce implementation costs, where possible. Easier upgrades and scalability, greater reliability, and a 5+ year lifespan also made CCC's list of requirements.
CBS provided an optional managed services component to cover out-of-hours infrastructure issues focused on getting operations back up fast.
“Our primary goal was to transition Campbelltown Catholic Club to a new scalable and reliable server platform to host its VMware workloads and deliver greater performance while reducing its current infrastructure footprint,” explains CBS Account Manager Steven Huttlestone.
With help from CBS Partner, Pure Storage, we undertook a server hardware refresh that included the supply and installation of server and shared storage infrastructure, with infrastructure management and support services to address CCC’s current needs and provide a reliable solution for the next 5-10 years.
We implemented a two-node VMware ESXi cluster backed by shared storage to host CCC’s current 28 Virtual Machine (VM) workloads and deliver sufficient resources to allow a single host to run all 28 VMs should an ESXi host fail.
HPE Persistent Memory offers CCC unprecedented levels of performance and the ability to run everything from the most basic to mission-critical applications and deploy with confidence.
With the pace of innovation faster than ever, it’s vital that your organisation’s storage plans today don’t box you in as your data grows. A Pure Storage Flasharray with 22TB of RAW storage capacity was added with industry-leading Compression and Deduplication technologies to actively reduce the size of CCC’s data by up to 5 times its current size—giving it room to expand capacity as its needs evolve.
The CBS team then tied the new compute and storage layers together with a dedicated iSCSI storage fabric and 10GbE connectivity for fast backbone connectivity.
Finally, we connected CCC’s legacy VMware ESXi hosts to the iSCSI storage network using 1GbE to migrate its VM workloads to the new infrastructure with minimal impact on the organisation’s operations.
To help CCC manage its new hardware and monitor its VM workloads, we added an optional Managed Services component that delivers around-the-clock IT support for critical infrastructure, including covering CCC IT during busy periods, applying critical security updates, and responding to and resolving issues out of hours.
“From the outset of our relationship, the team at CCC have been a pleasure to work with, always focusing on delivering solutions that provide their staff and customers with well-performing, secure, reliable, and future-proof solutions. It is a great business to work with and wonderful to see their influence and role within the local community,” says Steven.
Craig Butler, CCC's IT Manager
“The outcomes have been threefold,” he adds. “First, the solution allows us high availability. So, if a component were to die now, as far as the business goes, no one would notice.”
“Second, our response time is far quicker, ”he adds. “Built into our contract with CBS is a fast response if any of the components were to die, meaning we can fix single issues while the system is still running before they cascade into larger problems.”
“And finally, there’s no downtime when doing reboots and upgrades. In the past, we had to go offline to upgrade or reboot anything. With our new infrastructure flexibility, we can move things around to ensure it's business as usual,” Craig concludes.
Steven Huttlestone, Account Manager, Canon Business Services
“I’d like to thank CCC for the confidence they’ve placed in CBS to deliver IT projects and provide support over the past two years, and I look forward to building on this foundation into the future.”
By delivering a reliable, secure, scalable, and redundant solution tailored to its needs, CCC can now move confidently forward with its business operations. In addition, our managed services mean it enjoys 24x7 monitoring and management and evergreen, managed upgrades.
The result is an organisation better equipped to help its community thrive because it can meet its future growth needs.
