The Sullivan Group a Marathon Technologies Customer

I've spoken with the good folks of Marathon Technologies on several ocassions (seeMarathon Technologies launches everRun VM and Marathon Technologies and Microsoft dance together). This time, I had the opportunity to speak with  Erika Simpson, Network Administrator, and Rob Jones, IT Director, a user of Marathon's everRun VM, from The Sullivan Group. Thanks Erika and Rob for taking the time to chat!

Please tell us about your organization.

The Sullivan Group is a Human Resources Outsourcing (HRO) company based in Savannah, Georgia. The target market for the company is small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). At this time, The Sullivan Group has a customer base that is made up of hundreds of small businesses in Georgia and South Carolina.

The Sullivan Group provides each customer with the critical support and expert resources needed for a wide range of HR challenges including employee benefits, payroll, compliance tactics, staffing, and workers compensation insurance.

What are you doing that needed this technology?

In early 2008, The Sullivan Group’s IT department began the process of overhauling its IT infrastructure. Led by Network Administrator, Erika Simpson, the first phase of the update was to roll out a new Microsoft Dynamics-based software solution, SamWare, that provides critical business functions including human resources, payroll, financial management and compliance reporting.

In conjunction with implementing SamWare, the IT team also wanted to adopt server virtualization technology in order to simplify its data center, consolidate hardware and reduce the company’s environmental footprint. Server virtualization would also provide the company with high availability and disaster recovery benefits to ensure the safety and availability of critical business data.

What did you consider before making a selection?

The Sullivan Group had been using VMware's free product in production at least a year before making a switch. The move to SamWare was an opportunity to expand the organization's ability through the use of a different hardware and software platform.  They looked at VMware at the suggestion of several IT consultants. The company is a fan of open source and Linux technology and wanted to focus on that platform. They were familiar with XenSource before it was acquired by Citrix. They also had Marathon's technology recommended the same time. After evaluating the features and functions of the combination of XenServer and Marathon, it became clear that other products couldn't do the same things.

Why did you select this product?

The Sullivan Group selected Citrix XenServer virtualization. The open source ecosystem was attractive option for the company. The tight level of integration of XenServer with Marathon Technologies' high availability software was also an important consideration.

Why was Marathon's everRun important?

Marathon’s everRun® VM delivers reliable protection for critical virtual workloads by providing redundant virtual machines and synchronized mirroring of the entire system including network, applications and data. The integration of Citrix XenServer “bare-metal” performance and everRun VM’s unique software fault tolerant architecture were important to The Sullivan Group. The combination of Citrix XenServer with Marathon Technologies' everRun® VM gave them confidence to host critical applications in a virtual environment.

What tangible benefits can you attribute to use of this product?

Since implementing Citrix XenServer and Marathon’s everRun VM, which The Sullivan Group is now leveraging to protect their Microsoft SQL and SamWare applications, the company has had zero downtime, even during a significant failure.

After realizing the data protection benefits of running two of its critical applications in its new server virtualization environment, The Sullivan Group has plans to expand its use of virtualization. The company migrated their legacy software, the precursor to SamWare and EEMACT a human resources product and file shares from their physical environment to their virtual environments with the confidence that customers’ data will be up, running and available at all times. They are looking into virtual desktops as well.

What advice would you offer others facing similar challenges?

Here's what The Sullivan Group suggests:

• Having a powerful enough infrastructure is something to focus on.  Although the economy is tight, it is worth acquiring sufficient hardaware and software resources to test applications before deploying.  They are happy that they selected 64-bit industry standard systems as a platform because it has offered more than enough performance to handle their workloads.
• Test until you can't test any more. This will allow you to make mistakes, learn from them and yet not have a negative impact on customers and their data.
• Read the instructions. If you don't understand the instructions look for help from the vendor, from blogs, from forums and if all else fails, google it!

Their implementation has been nearly flawless and they're pleased with both XenServer and everRun VM.