Modernizing the Manufacturing Data Center at CHI Overhead Doors
A leading private manufacturer of residential and commercial garage doors, C.H.I. Overhead Doors wanted to ensure regulatory compliance and position the enterprise for growth. This strategy required modernization of their data center and overall infrastructure. Corporate IT leadership turned to Burwood Group to assess the data center and uncover new opportunities to advance its business goals.
The Challenge: Modernize Data Center Strategy for Security and Business Continuity
With its robust manufacturing capabilities and bustling business office, Illinois-based C.H.I. Overhead Doors has been serving homeowners, businesses, dealers, and architects since 1981. The enterprise needed to ensure that the data center could support regulatory requirements. Improved business continuity and data security were overarching goals.
After a selective search, C.H.I. Overhead Doors chose Burwood Group to execute a data center assessment. Burwood’s detailed recommendations revealed areas of improvement for high availability and business continuity. C.H.I. Overhead Doors needed a failover strategy, as well as application reengineering to ensure high availability.
““At every Burwood Group meeting, we walk away with leading industry best practice recommendations on how to improve the performance and reliability of our network infrastructure.” ”
The Solution: Align Data Center Strategy with Larger Business Objectives
Following the assessment, C.H.I. Overhead Doors retained Burwood Group for the solution implementation phase. First, Burwood rebuilt the company’s data center with Cisco’s Unified Computing System® (Cisco UCS®) technology, which automates application deployment and workloads and supports very large data transmissions. To ensure high availability and support disaster recovery, Burwood experts recommended and built out a second “bunker” data center, as well as two additional data centers, that support operations and eliminate single points of failure.
The next step was strengthening security for C.H.I Overhead Doors’ business and production networks. Burwood helped the company design and execute a network segmentation strategy. This resulted in a new network for manufacturing operations.
The Outcome: Robust Data Center Strategy that Supports Compliance and High Availability
Today, C.H.I. Overhead Doors operates with a robust disaster recovery strategy, assuring high availability for its critical operations. Network segmentation and a data access governance framework ensure that only authorized users—whether inside or outside of the company—have the necessary access to the business and production networks.
Futhermore, to support the growing technical complexity of its computing environment, C.H.I. Overhead Doors has tapped Burwood Group’s Managed Services team to manage the company’s business and production networking, as well as its Citrix systems, enabling the staff to focus on strategic business priorities.
Burwood Group Services
Data Center Assessment
Data Center Strategy
Network Segmentation
Data Access Governance
Managed Services
““Many service providers focus on point-specific products. Burwood Group has a broader perspective that helped us align our data center strategy with our business goals. Zach Steffan and Kevin Rainey are both subject matter experts and trusted technical advisors to our team. ”