California Association Of Realtors (C.A.R.) Makes a Smart Move

C.A.R. has over 100 local member associations and over 200,000 realtors, realtor associates, and affiliate members. They needed an environment that could expand as needed, competitive fixed pricing, and services they could depend on.

The CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® (C.A.R.) includes 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 an enormous website, which is both member- and public-facing, and has a vast range of applications running through the site and in the data centers.

Goals

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 the 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 the 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.

"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."
Josh Sharfman, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, C.A.R.

Solution Delivered

With OVHcloud as a partner, C.A.R. migrated their 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 their 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 of being completely disconnected from their environment and unable even to remediate issues without back-end support.

Results, ROI, and Future Plans

Success breeds success. Some of the examples are the deployment of C.A.R.'s VeloCloud SD-WAN between their 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 their VMware vSphere environments in both of the data centers. Also, when C.A.R. lost one of their 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. 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."
Josh Sharfman, Chief Technology, and Innovation Officer, C.A.R.

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