LeTigre measures our successes by results. Over the years, many of our solutions have impacted businesses positively and have allowed our clients to grow and be more competitive. We take great pride in our clients sucesses and strive to make every project a success story.

Fresh Pipes for this Houston Based Petrochem company as LeTigre assists with

the implementation of their new virtual servers and storage project for their Houston

datacenter that will replicate to a new Canadian colo.

The Industry 

Those who have been around the oil industry have seen the ups and downs of an ever-changing industry.  Successful petrochem companies have found a way to utilize technology to provide a winning edge to provide higher availability to its employees/users, system adaptability to a changing business climate, and business continuity even with system and site outages.   In short, they need answers quicker and more reliably.

The Target 

When an international oil and oilfield services company chose to upgrade the infrastructure of their organization, they looked to the experience and technical knowledge of LeTigre Solutions.  The project was developed in three parts:

1. centralize all the offices based in the United States into one hosted location with local redundancy

2. centralize the Canadian based offices into a Canadian hosted location with local redundancy

3. replicate the two datacenters to each other.

Implementation 

Developing a true partnership for implementation, Oil Company and LeTigre Solutions began setting the foundation for the new environment with VMware, Citrix, HP/UX, and Microsoft foundation.  After the foundation was completed, the applications were loaded and tested.  Each part of the process was developed as a joint effort, with the final testing completed by the customer. 

Status 

While this project has just started the second step, the processes developed in step one will lend itself to a high degree of confidence for the remainder of the project:

*Server Virtualization

*Template development for Citrix environment

*Storage Virtualization and presentation

*Multipath and redundant data development

*Network Security

*Environment upgrades (Exchange 2007, Windows 2008)

*Application presentation and customization (Citrix)

It’s Smooth Flying for This Weather and Aviation company as Its IT Infrastructure is
Stabilized and Disaster Recovery Measures Are Put in Place

The Challenge

A Houston-based Weather & Aviation company is a leading provider of trip support services such as weather, security, ground-handling and fueling for the business aviation market. the company made the decision to change and upgrade their IT System in the summer of 2006. This decision was based on their need to quickly adapt to a growing market, respond to new and changing customer demands and eliminate known
system instabilities.

In short, the company's growth was surpassing the capabilities of its data center. The response time for their support and concierge services was suffering, due to the increased demand for around the clock availability. The company knew they needed to migrate to a system that had more bandwidth and could more efficiently use power and cooling. They also sought to increase redundancy throughout their infrastructure. the company
believed this would insure customers would not have to experience a blip in service. As a result, an infrastructure overhaul became the company’s top priority, with the ultimate goal of quickly and cost-effectively creating an easy to manage, completely recoverable system.

The Starting Point 

For help in assessing the situation, the company turned to LeTigre Solutions, Inc., a Texas-based solutions provider and HP Gold Elite Partner. the company chose LeTigre based on its proven expertise in server, storage and networking solutions, its decade-long history as an enterprise HP Reseller and most importantly its unique approach, which looks closely at both business operations and technical factors before making a recommendation.

Based on LeTigre’s assessment, the company decided to move its production processing to a co-location site and use its current facility as a data recovery site. However, the process was far from simple, as the company first had to replace and reconfigure much of its existing hardware. In addition, both LeTigre and the company felt it was important to consolidate under one vendor where possible, as its current system was a conglomeration of Dell, IBM, Sun and generic servers, blades and storage hardware.

A Delicate Implementation aka “The Solution” 

LeTigre’s technical engineers worked for months to architect a solution, knowing implementation would need to be thoughtful and in tune with every detail, due to
the company’s requirement that service interruptions be minimal. The goal of the solution was to leverage the best of the company’s legacy equipment while replacing its failing equipment with newer, more reliable products from HP. What’s more, the new solution needed to provide primary tier failover in case of equipment or software failure as well an easily recoverable third tier in case of an unforeseen facilities breach. LeTigre’s solution focused on four areas: Servers, Storage, Backups/Replication, and Applications.

SERVERS LeTigre migrated the company’s Sun (Intel/AMD), SUSE, Red Hat,Windows and other operating systems running on various server hardware to HP Blade Systems and Proliant-based Servers. The result was a maximization of system performance, reduction of power and cooling costs and a common platform for easy maintenance. LeTigre also rebuilt the company’s Oracle applications, Oracle database and custom applications, allowing each tier to be separated for redundancy and security. This also supported a move toward an Oracle 10g or 11g migration, which will likely occur down the road.

STORAGE LeTigre migrated the company’s Sun/HDS storage environment to HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA), which included a HP Tape Library and the HP Storage Essentials Suite. This made managing the company’s storage equipment easier for the IT team.

BACKUP & REPLICATION LeTigre developed a new backup environment for
the company, extending its previous NetBackup environment and providing the company
with consistent backup capabilities across all platforms. LeTigre also engineered a
remote production facility (15 miles from the company’s corporate headquarters) and
replicated all of the company’s critical applications for the data recovery site.

APPLICATIONS LeTigre updated and re-deployed all of the company’s critical
applications, as well as installed VMware and HP ProLiant Essentials Virtualization
Management Software.

The Results

From the beginning, LeTigre Solutions focused on insuring the company would come out
of the process with a scalable and unified infrastructure, enabling it to support its growing
business and provide unparalleled customer service. This goal was clearly achieved. For
example, system response time is up from an average of five to seven minutes to an
average of 15 seconds, giving pilots true real time access to the information they need.
the company is also seeing increased utilization of its servers and computing power, as
well as increased manageability of its environment. And, perhaps most importantly,
the company can rest assured that the system will not fail, as there are now back up measures
in place.
The results of the project have been so positive for the company they are now looking
toward the future with LeTigre, planning a third data facility, located outside of
Houston.