About Walthall Oil Company
Technology has changed a lot since 1952 — the year Walthall Oil Company was founded — and yet, the company continues to set the standard in the petroleum market. With more than 130 employees, technology plays an increasingly important role in the wholesale distribution and retail petroleum industry.
Walthall Oil Company, with thousands of gallons of flammable liquid and petroleum products stored and sold across the South, turned to Dynamic Quest to provide IT expertise, disaster recovery planning and management of its entire core infrastructure.
The situation
Frustrations started to impact employee efficiencies
With servers becoming nonresponsive and access to key company data being interrupted when technology reached capacity, Walthall Oil Company needed a change in the way they handled their business data.
Walthall Oil Company uses two main applications to run their wholesale and retail side of their business: DM2 and Pinnacle. These core applications are essential to tracking sales information, inventory levels and improving store operations.
Leveraging a combination of physical and virtual server technologies, many applications have been migrated over to the Walthall virtual server environment. However, some legacy solutions still have a requirement for a physical server. One of these legacy solutions uses a Brooktrout Fax card to provide network faxing services. Walthall uses Microsoft Server technologies to power their back-office services and Microsoft Windows and Office on user systems.
Dynamic Quest to the rescue
Walthall was interested in learning more about the Dynamic Quest managed IT services program, a model that seemed to perfectly fit what Walthall was looking for.
Concerned about having to invest a lot of money to upgrade the infrastructure, Dynamic Quest’s Hardware-as-a-Service program provided a solution that allowed Walthall to finance their technology. This solution saved them from a major cash outlay and achieved their immediate goal of having the server environment stable and reliable, keeping any major disaster from crippling their business.
“We are a family company that appreciates working with local people we know. We get calls every day from companies out of the area wanting to do work for us, but we don’t really know them. It helps having someone local here who can service us quickly when things go wrong. That’s the way we treat our customers.”
The technology plan
Dynamic Quest recommended a consolidated virtual server environment consisting of two Cisco C Series servers and an EMC storage appliance to replace Walthall’s seven physical Dell and HP servers that were currently in use.
The virtual server configuration allows for all applications and responsibilities of the existing individual servers to be performed on fewer physical machines. The two Cisco C Series servers provide load balancing capabilities for the virtual server instances, providing automated failover in the event issues take the virtual instance (or the entire server) offline. This technique provides more uptime and reduces user interruption.
An EMC VNX-e 3100 series storage appliance provides application and user data in a single location. This method allows for easy scalability as data growth occurs.
Future server needs can be met by adding an additional server “instance” while keeping the existing hardware. This allows the company to adapt new applications with minimal hardware/software costs and implementation time. Cooling and power consumption costs are reduced since fewer physical servers are running in the data closet.
The result
A combination of proven solutions that fully address Walthall Oil’s needs
Backup and disaster recovery
Built to recover. Data is automatically replicated to the remote location. If the local EMC VNX-e fails, all Walthall Oil servers will automatically switch over to the remote unit until the local appliance is brought back online.
Strategic technology planning
Built for long-term growth. Dynamic Quest continues to guide Walthall Oil with all major technology initiatives. New technologies on the roadmap include a new telephone system and assisting with expansion into the Florida market.
Flexible financing
Built for accessible solutions Dynamic Quest’s Hardware-as-a-Service program provides full management of Walthall Oil’s server environment, saving Walthall the challenges associated with having to hire a new IT professional.
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