Case Study: Great Plains Communications achieves improved performance, resiliency and cost savings for virtualized applications with DataCore Software

Great Plains Communications - Customer Case Study

Great Plains Communications, a Nebraska-based telecommunications and Internet service provider, faced growing performance and continuity challenges for corporate applications that handle customer records, billing, email and business reporting across two data centers. To boost application response, ensure continuous availability and simplify storage management, Great Plains deployed a virtualization stack built around DataCore’s SANsymphony‑V (alongside VMware for server/desktop virtualization and Fusion‑io flash for acceleration).

DataCore virtualized and synchronously mirrored block storage between the two sites, using SANsymphony‑V auto‑tiering to place critical I/O on Fusion‑io flash while falling back to SAS/SATA as needed, and VMware to run ~150 virtual servers and ~200 concurrent virtual desktops. The result was active‑active resiliency with seamless failover, greatly improved performance (enterprise reports that went from minutes to seconds), centralized provisioning of 60 TB managed capacity (30 TB usable) and support for 11,000 customer mailboxes — demonstrating that DataCore delivered the speed, redundancy and cost efficiencies Great Plains required.

Great Plains Communications

Wyatt Leehy

Systems Analyst