Case Study – Triangle Tool

Challenge 
Triangle Tool Corporation, a firm specializing in injection mold design, manufacturing and  custom machining located in northwest Milwaukee, was using outdated and unreliable servers. The company was not aware that when a typical server is used, it’s only operating at about 6% to 10% of total capacity, leaving paid resources sitting around and doing nothing.

Because SSR technicians had been working with Triangle Tool as the company’s main source of technical support for nearly a decade, they knew the infrastructure and recommended virtualization as a logical fit.

Solution
Virtualization software, often referred to as the “Hypervisor,” allows for multiple operating systems to be segmented into virtual machines using just one piece of hardware. Virtual machines can be added to a server to increase productivity and efficiency for a business IT system.

“First, we had to understand what virtualization meant and how it would benefit us over our current setup,” says Marc Krewald, onsite system administrator at Triangle Tool Corporation. “We were new to the technology, but for SSR, it was a matter of explaining the setup process and implementing the updated system without causing any significant downtime.”

Results 
Triangle Tool’s days of operating a server at such a low capacity are gone thanks to SSR. SSR consolidated the environment from several servers down to two servers and a Storage Area Network (SAN).

Except for normal updates, virtualization has been self-supporting and the company now spends less money on maintenance, power, space and downtime, allowing Triangle Tool to spend more time on designing and manufacturing molds and tooling.

“SSR engineers come in once a month to check over the system and make sure it’s running smoothly,” adds Krewald. “There have been no major issues on the project, and we are satisfied with the end result.”