A premier photography studio providing professionals photos for weddings and other life events, who also hold contract with several school districts providing senior pictures for over 7000 students in the area.
They had a MacPro Server with old iMacs as workstations running database software that tracks each photo sessions called Proselect. They also use Adobe Creative suite to edit and touch up photos. They constantly have issues with connections to the server and slow file manipulation and opening. Their data size is 20TB and rising fast. They needed a new server solution with twice the data size in storage and backups. BrenTech was hired to migrate the data and technology to something more stable and productive.
During investigating the issues BrenTech engineers found that the network had subpar cabling, switches, and the server was 10 years old running an OSx that was being deprecated. The workstations were also aging and needed upgrading. During the investigation, the client decided to move to a new office about 10 miles away and asked that BrenTech move the equipment and infrastructure for them.
BrenTech quoted a gigabyte backbone using level3 switches to isolate and control VoiP traffic separately from data on the network. A new server running Microsoft Server 2019 with 24 cores and 128GB ram along with a 10 Gbps network connection to the switch was also recommended. The drives used on the server were 2 x 1TB enterprise SSD in a RAID 1 configuration for the operating system and 6 16TB 7200 Enterprise NAS drives in a RAID 50 configuration giving the server 64TB of data space. A NAS configured with RAID 50 providing 64TB of disk space was configured for the backup drive as well. They moved their office during the project and new cat 6e cabling was put in facilitating the 10GB speeds on the network. New workstations were purchased with 10 Gbps network cards, 500GB SSD, i7 processors, and 64GB ram on each.
BrenTech moved the old equipment and installed the new equipment in parallel with the old to reduce any down time. The migration of data was performed over a weekend and completed by Monday morning when the staff came in to work.
The entire project took one month from inspection to migration of the data and workstations in the new office. The owner was “amazed at the lack of downtime during migration and the new speed of the network and the incredible increase to productivity of the staff and photographers.”