Sticky Fingers Restaurant is known for the best authentic Memphis-style ribs and barbecue in the South.  Headquartered in Mount Pleasant, SC, Sticky Fingers has 17 locations throughout the Southeast.  Having undergone a change in ownership in late 2008, Sticky Fingers identified a need to review their current IT Strategy along with a need to partner with a local IT Solutions provider.

eGroup, also a Mount Pleasant based company, is an enterprise solutions and services firm delivering sophisticated solutions for progressive corporate customers across the Carolinas since 1999. In early 2003, Sticky Fingers engaged eGroup to design and deploy a robust virtualized network infrastructure with a shared storage, and a first class backup strategy.

After a thorough systems review and much planning, eGroup and Sticky Fingers developed a solution that reduced the number of servers in their network from 5 Physical Servers to 2 VMware Hosts, with an EMC AX4 SAN for shared storage. To accomplish the goals for the backup strategy, Veeam Backup & Replication for VMware was utilized for backup to disc. This positions Sticky Fingers to also take advantage of an offsite backup/replication strategy for their virtual environment down the road.

Sticky Fingers realized several immediate benefits from this solution. With space at a premium in the data center, they were able to reduce their server footprint.  Also, with a server refresh on the horizon, Sticky Fingers was able to avoid the costs of purchasing 4 to 5 new servers. One of the existing servers was re-purposed as a VMware Host and only one additional server purchase was required to serve as a second host. This will reduce ongoing costs related to power and cooling consumption, along with maintenance costs for multiple physical servers. Additionally, their per application costs and time associated with application deployment have been greatly reduced. Sticky Fingers will also be able to take advantage of increased application uptime with VMware features such as vMotion, HA and Fault Tolerance.

This robust solution will position Sticky Fingers to utilize technology to drive business and provide flexibility to grow as the business needs arise.

Tags: backup/replication strategy, Charleston, eGroup, EMC AX4 SAN, Fault Tolerance, HA, reduced footprint, reduced power and cooling, shared storage, Sticky Fingers Restaurant, Veeam Backup & Replication, virtualization, virtualized network infrastructure, VMotion, VMware Hosts