Helixstorm Datacenter Solutions Solve O’Neill’s IT Security Issues

The Challenge

Updating Legacy Infrastructure

The clothing dynasty used legacy servers as the backbone of its IT infrastructure, creating a host of challenges, including:

Performance and Security Issues: Legacy systems caused performance and security issues for O’Neill. Using legacy system architecture, the team wasted valuable resources and spent needlessly on additional servers. O’Neill needed to get more out of its existing resources.

“We knew we needed to update our datacenter,” Peter McAneny said. “Our system was running way too slow, we were spending way too much to maintain legacy servers and we were wasting IT resources.”

Time-Consuming Server Maintenance: O’Neill’s IT infrastructure consisted of 13 servers, which were inflexible and time-consuming to manage. Provisioning servers and deploying applications required significant amounts of time and manpower.

Lack of Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity: O’Neill also had no disaster recovery plan in place. Without proper provisions for business continuity, O’Neill was susceptible to lost productivity in the event of a system failure, power outage, natural disaster or service interruption.

The Solution:

Data Center Consolidation and Ongoing IT Support

O’Neill turned to Helixstorm, an IT services firm specializing in data center architecture, to solve its technology challenges. Helixstorm delivered a complete solution for the apparel giant, including:

Assessment and Planning: Before proceeding with a solution, Helixstorm engineers performed capacity planning to assess the existing O’Neill environment. They listened to the business requirements, gathered inventory and performance data and determined the technical requirements. After monitoring O’Neill’s environment for five weeks, Helixstorm found O’Neill was vastly underutilizing capacity.

Architecture and Engineering: Helixstorm recommended consolidating O’Neill’s existing systems, decreasing physical systems by 85%. After developing a detailed project roadmap, Helixstorm provisioned all hardware and software and migrated the data to the new turnkey solution. The engineering team followed the project roadmap to deliver the new solution on time and with no service interruption to O’Neill.

Ongoing IT Support: Post-migration, Helixstorm also offered ongoing IT support to maintain the new environment and thwart any potential issues.

Benefits: Boosting ROI and Reducing Security Vulnerabilities

Helixstorm exposed series issues within O’Neill’s existing IT environment and consolidated its datacenter, eliminating security vulnerabilities while extending resource capacity. The new system provided O’Neill with a more flexible and agile infrastructure to respond to changing business demands.

The new solution also enabled O’Neill to:

• Maximize existing IT resources
• Increase the availability of hardware and applications for improved business continuity
• Provide operational flexibility to the network and managing personnel
• Reduce the recover time objective and recovery point objective

Since the new data center transition, the company has seen major performance improvements and is no longer concerned about wasted resources and limited performance. They also noticed significant decreases in energy usage and bills.