When the California Association of Realtors, the premier representative of the state’s real estate professionals, faced the possibility of migrating all of its on-premise computing because of a location move, it partnered with OVHcloud.
The California Association of Realtors is a statewide trade association dedicated to the advancement of professionalism in real estate.
Itincludes more than 100 local member associations and more than 200,000 realtors, realtor-associates and affiliate members. It is the premier representative of the state’s real estate professionals and the go-to resource for information, products, programs and services.
The organization has a content-heavy website, which is both member and public-facing, and has a vast range of applications running through the site and in the data centers.
Challenges
In addition to a highly complex and ever-growing IT enterprise, C.A.R.’s impending location move meant they would need to migrate all of its on-premise computing. The IT team couldn’t risk the loss of any membership, identity or financial data, or a disruption to the website or its many applications, including those visible to the public, proprietary to members, for business and operations, and for the coordination of information between the National Association of Realtors and the 100 or so local associations of realtors across the state.
Josh Sharfman, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, C.A.R, said: “To move all of our on-premise computing, we were faced with building our own colocation facility or acquiring space in a colocation facility and owning and operating our own equipment. We realized we could kill two birds with one stone with OVHcloud.”
Solution delivered
With OVHcloud as a partner, C.A.R. migrated its on-premise workloads to OVHcloud’s Oregon data center, with backups being sent to the OVHcloud data center in Virginia.
C.A.R. also moved many of its development and staging workloads that were on-premise to OVHcloud’s data center in Vint Hill, Virginia. The development workloads are also backed up using OVHcloud vRack to a storage server in Hillsboro, Oregon, as a Disaster Recovery (DR) solution.
VMware NSX was used to eliminate C.A.R.’s previous virtual switching and load balancing issues that could have taken their entire environment down. It also eliminated their IT team’s problem with being completely disconnected from their environment and unable even to remediate issues without back-end support.
“We couldn’t do our job without VMwareNSX. That’s the bottom line,” said Sharfman. “We have six load balancers configured, a whole variety of switching at multiple subnets and all sorts of predefined routing between our data centers that are all meshed together in an SD-WAN environment. We’re very pleased with it.”
Results, ROI and future plans
Success breeds success. Some of the examples are the deployment of C.A.R.’s VeloCloud SD-WAN between its local offices and OVHcloud’s two data centers, the three-tiered Disaster Recovery solution, and the bare metal servers with vRack that are committed to and are accessible to its VMware vSphere environments in both of the data centers.
Also, when C.A.R. lost one of its physical servers over a weekend, which could have been devastating, VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduling feature worked perfectly and moved the workloads to other servers in the vSphere cluster while a replacement server was provisioned automatically.
OVHcloud’s automation has proven invaluable in allowing C.A.R. to dynamically expand its environment as needed and add resources easily and quickly.
“Having fixed bandwidth and computing pricing and a competitive overall pricing structure really helps me a lot,” said Sharfman.
“I also value our biweekly meetings with the OVHcloud team because we’re partnering togethering to mitigate problems, build robust infrastructures and plan for the future. I really feel they are an extension of our team.”
OVHcloud is a global cloud provider that specializes in delivering industry-leading performance and cost-effective solutions to better manage, secure and scale data. OVHcloud provides a smarter alternative for web hosting, emails, bare metal servers, hosted private cloud, hybrid and public cloud solutions.
The group manages 30 data centers across 12 sites in four continents, manufacturing its own servers, building its own data centers and deploying its own fibre-optic global network to achieve maximum efficiency. Through OVHcloud’s spirit of challenging the status quo, the company brings freedom, security and innovation to solve data challenges – now and in the future.
With a 20-year heritage and a solid European foundation, OVHcloud is committed to developing responsible technologists, as the group strives to be the driving force behind the next cloud evolution.
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