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Align had been providing support to Steve Madden for more than five years. When its business plan required a significant IT investment to support international growth, Steve Madden turned to its trusted advisor, Align, to develop a holistic solution to help the company address:

• End-of-life network and systems equipment
• Data center space constraints
• DR and BCP challenges
• New application integration
• Antiquated WAN technologies

Align’s technology engineers met this challenge by developing and deploying a scalable and highly available architecture for the production systems. One of the key requirements was cross training and educating Steve Madden’s support staff to be able to handle day-to-day operations. Working closely with Madden engineers, Align designed, engineered, deployed and thoroughly documented the solutions to deliver knowledge transfer and training that ensured a smooth transition.

With Align’s expertise in network, IP telephony, Microsoft technologies and advanced virtualization deployments, Align delivered on time and on budget with 100 percent uptime. We continue to work with Steve Madden on numerous projects and are currently helping the company transition to a Windows 7 and Exchange 2010 environment that utilizes a VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) globally.

Outsourced Case Study / LBHI >

As part of a major restructuring, Lehman Brothers Holdings, Inc. (LBHI) required a new flexible, scalable, and cost-effective global network infrastructure to support its changing technology needs.

Six of the top technology-outsourcing firms were chosen to submit proposals, but only Align’s innovative approach won the engagement. Align’s evaluation and strategic planning process resulted in a unique and flexible solution enabling LBHI to “rent” its technology infrastructure on a monthly basis and bypass the need for upfront capital. Our IT project-management, integration, and managed-services expertise delivered a complete solution within six months – providing for data centers, server farms/storage, networks, and voice infrastructure for a complete user, data, and application migration.

An on-site, private VMware cloud-computing platform delivered speed and flexibility for time-sensitive applications and data, while less critical applications and data were migrated to an off-site location. This approach maximized the benefits of both – low-latency computing via on-site technology combined with cost savings from off-site storage. All locations were replicated to a disaster recovery site to ensure business resiliency.

Working with key LBHI stakeholders, Align executed the outsourced solution for LBHI on time and within budget and delivered an independent IT infrastructure and operational system that is secure, fully accessible and scalable. Combined with a per-user support fee structure, LBHI can now leverage its cash flow more effectively and scale its technology needs up or down as business requirements change. The outsource model delivers 60 percent savings – $36 million – in OPEX annually and saves LBHI from having to purchase equipment.

Following our needs assessment and working closely with business and IT leadership teams, Align developed a program to deliver a scalable, globally available and consistent IT-wide data center infrastructure. Our plan outlined improvements to processes and policies related to IT change, upgrades, troubleshooting and remediation. Enhanced metrics, reporting and analysis on IT spend for hardware, software, utilities and real estate were also provided.

Our proven data center move and migration process offered confidence to stakeholders that business uptime would be maintained. In the first 12 months, our initiatives helped yield savings in excess of $7M and are on target to deliver over $30 million in savings during a five-year term – all while improving technology availability and service support to all business units.

Hybrid Co-Lo Case Study / C12 Capital >

A spin off from Barclays, C12 Capital was under tight deadlines to fully separate its business operations from the international banking giant. Within a mere three months, C12 had to have its own technology infrastructure up and running, which, given its lack of facilities at its Manhattan headquarters, required deployment to two co-location facilities – one primary and one backup. A key component of this spin off was the relocation of 50 traders, 40 back-office personnel, and the company’s 15-person London office.

For this challenging project, C12 turned to Align to design and implement a fully redundant voice and data solution. Working closely with C12’s project team, Align harnessed its project-management and advanced-technology expertise to deploy a hybrid technology platform of both physical and virtual technologies.

We engaged two co-location providers to support the planned user base and leveraged their Tier 3 facilities to build out a secure enterprise-level infrastructure.

Three months later, Align’s project leadership had successfully separated C12 from Barclays – on time and on budget – delivering a secure, reliable, and flexible infrastructure solution. Traditional and virtual environments were brought online concurrently, helping expedite personnel relocation. The hybrid solution, optimized for DR and BCP scenarios, fostered a high-performing technology infrastructure across the various facilities, resulting in reduced CAPEX and high-level redundancy.

Align successfully completed the 36-month engagement and continues to work closely with this client to manage move/add/change (MAC) work within their new facility.

Align used Asset Point and integrated it with iTRACS, a cable management package, and APC’s ISX Central tool, a power monitoring tool, to allow users to check connectivity and power consumption for each asset in the data center.

As part of our turnkey solution, the Asset Point audit team inventoried 2,600 data center cabinets with over 16,000 technology assets. Using APScan on hand-held devices, our team was able to complete this effort at a rate of 1000 cabinets/month.

Align’s helped 500 users to be efficiently relocated to the new Whippany, NJ, data center over two weekends.

After this successful project, Align was engaged to design and build two new data centers in England. After initial consultation with and a review of the cabinet RFPs, Align worked with the client to design a flexible and redundant cable and power distribution system. We assisted with the migration of circuits and equipment in completed quadrants of the data center while managing the build out of the remaining quadrants.

• Physical and virtual servers using four primary OS platforms
• The relocation of more than 75 terabytes of SAN storage
• Hundreds of external network connections supporting several thousand production applications
• Hundreds of servers running on obsolete hardware
• 100% uptime for all production applications

Align provided a single point of contact for all technology disciplines and application owners. Critical efforts included:

• Web-based dashboard reports on the sign-off rate for each server and its hosted applications
• Physical removal of all servers from the racks
• Supervision of packing and transportation to the new location
• Verification of racked servers, patching and network connectivity

Align tracked all troubleshooting activities and sign off on:

• Third-party hardware and maintenance vendors
• Enterprise storage group
• System administrators
• Application owners

To date, Align has managed the migration of all of these devices with no impact to any of the businesses.