For almost eighty years, Buyken Metal Products has provided high-quality precision sheet metal forming, stamping and fabrication to various industries including automotive, medical and electronics. Buyken is committed to finding the most appropriate and costeffective solution for its customers, and as its network aged, the company realized that part of this mission can be achieved by keeping up with the newest technologies available.
Before virtualization, the company data center consisted of servers – each running their own specific application. This infrastructure created a huge problem because when one server went down, Buyken’s business also went down. Buyken realized that it needed to ensure business continuity, and that the various data collection devices, servers, and software throughout its organization would have to be updated.
“We knew that to solve these problems we needed to re-architect our data center to provide some redundancy and have more operating systems running,” said Mark Delaurenti, president of Buyken Metal Products. “Buying more physical machines was a cost barrier, so we began looking into other options.”
Buyken hired an outside consultant Seattle-based Moose Logic, to re-architect their data center. In April 2007, Buyken decided to virtualize with Citrix's commercial enterprise product, XenServer Enterprise Edition. Scott Gorcester, president of Moose Logic, first heard about XenServer at a conference, and began researching and learning more from information available online.
The decision to go with Citrix XenServer was due to a number of factors including the ability to virtualize Windows with paravirtualization—a virtualization technology that provides greater security and less overhead than alternative approaches—and a significantly lower cost of entry for an enterprise-level product. “XenServer allowed us to more effectively leverage high performance servers,” said Gorcester. “It is a cost-effective solution for enterprise virtualization, and offered Buyken key benefits including business continuity, and the opportunity to save on space and energy costs.”
All of Buyken’s servers, with Intel dual-core Xeon chips, now run approximately three to four operating systems. To ensure business continuity, Moose Logic designed the system so that the operating systems could be moved to another server if necessary. “We built this system to provide redundancy for all critical systems including the Active Directory Domain Controllers and the Terminal Servers,” said Joanne McKinney, IT director at Buyken. “Now, in case of a catastrophic event like a server failure, we will still have critical systems up and running.”
“Citrix XenServer has given us a much more modular network environment,” added McKinney. “Because of this, we are not only able to offer our customers the highest level of service possible, but have also unexpectedly received a new level of security.”
Deploying the new data center from start to finish took less than two weeks. “The project was accelerated because of the ease of cloning guest operating systems,” said Gorcester. “Our team is familiar with other virtualization solutions, so that definitely helped, but we were pleasantly surprised at the ease of use of Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition. In a day we were up and running with all new operating systems and ready to go.”
With the new infrastructure now in place, Buyken doesn’t worry about system failures, and can better manage its network. “The ease of being able to grab images of systems is significant, and the speed of server deployment has shaved days off of our projects,” said McKinney. “Additionally, the ability to protect our system by exporting images to another device gives us much more comfort in our ability to keep the system up and running.”
Although Buyken has only used Citrix XenServer for a few months, their entire system is up and running and they are happy with their new enhanced and virtualized data center. “The cost of an operating system pales in comparison to the cost of bringing in a brand new piece of equipment. That’s a lot of savings,” stated McKinney. “And we’ve been very pleased with the significant performance improvements of our system and the benefits we will pass on to our clients.”
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