Case Study: Air Combat Command achieves high-availability SharePoint performance and rapid COOP/DR recovery with Dell EMC

Virtualization simplifies Continuity of Operations (COOP) for mission-critical collaboration

Air Combat Command (ACC), a major U.S. Air Force command with roughly 80,000 users, faced performance and stability problems with its mission-critical Microsoft SharePoint 2007 intranet that ran on seven physical servers and relied on on-site disk-to-tape backups—making disaster recovery a matter of days or weeks. To address these risks and meet DoD DR/COOP requirements, Air Combat Command engaged Dell EMC to redesign and virtualize the SharePoint environment, leveraging VMware ESX/vCenter (HA and DRS), VMware Site Recovery Manager, and Dell EMC RecoverPoint for replication.

Dell EMC rebuilt the SharePoint and SQL Server clusters, deployed a hardened VMware virtual infrastructure across production and a geographically separated secondary site, and implemented SAN-based, WAN-optimized replication with RecoverPoint plus automated failover with SRM. The solution delivered near 99.99% uptime, guaranteed RTO of four hours or less and RPO of 30 minutes or less, dramatically reduced latency for users, cut DR/COOP costs by about one-third versus external options, and shortened implementation from over a year to roughly four months.

Air Combat Command

Bill Marion

CTO