The Problem

In recent years, Boston Ballet has experienced rapid growth, with increased revenue, operating budgets, and audience interest. Prior to this, IT was not a strategic differentiator for the organization; the existing IT infrastructure consisted primarily of aging equipment and multiple points of inefficiency. Like many nonprofits having to make hard investment choices, the IT department was struggling to meet the demands of an organization that operates year-round.

Outages and network bandwidth constraints were frequent. The IT staff needed to closely monitor and limit system usage, making it hard for other departments within the organization to effectively do their jobs. Poor network performance and systems failures also impacted the quality of their patrons' online experience. Their disaster recovery site was also problematic, plagued with issues that required members of the Boston Ballet IT team to make regular site visits to reset the systems.

The Solution

Boston Ballet interacts heavily with its patrons through its website and online experience, meaning uptime is of critical importance. With surging demand for online and digital marketing initiatives to reach their growing audience, Nathan Burlak, Director of Information Technology, partnered with the executive team to establish a vision for their next-generation data center infrastructure.

To start, Burlak selected the Markley Cloud to host Boston Ballet's website to improve its online customer experience. Because Markley sits at the crossroads of New England's internet traffic, Boston Ballet is well served with high bandwidth connectivity for both their internal network and public-facing website.

Within short order, Boston Ballet started to move more of its infrastructure to the Markley Cloud. Today, Boston Ballet's complete IT infrastructure runs in the Markley Cloud. This includes web services, customer ticketing and email management systems, as well as directory services, file servers, and ERP and financial applications.

The Results

With the Markley Cloud and continuous support from Markley's team of experts, Boston Ballet has completely transformed its IT infrastructure and networking functions. The nonprofit has gained highly available systems, consistent cooling and power, uninterruptible networking, unlimited bandwidth, and superior performance. In total, the solution supports Boston Ballet's efforts to drive growth and improve its customer experience, from website uptime, streaming videos and online transactions.

With Markley, Boston Ballet no longer has to manage bandwidth capacity. Nor do their systems need to shut down for maintenance or unexpected outages. Instead, as Burlak explained, "With the Markley Cloud, Boston Ballet is able to focus on the artistic mission, confident that our IT infrastructure is always on and accessible."

Conclusion

To achieve high availability for its mission-critical data and IT functions, Burlak and the Markley Cloud team architected the production site and disaster recovery site across two cloud Points-of-Presence (PoPs). Critical transactional workloads are hosted on a Microsoft SQL Server database cluster that synchronously replicates between the two sites. This is achieved using a redundant pair of dedicated, low latency 1Gbit DWDM links, procured from Markley.

Boston Ballet also deployed the Markley Cloud Backup as a Service, Powered by Veeam. Using this managed service, the backup and recovery process is managed by Markley engineers. "We sleep well knowing our data is backed up by Markley using Veeam according to schedules we collaboratively defined. Data recovery is just a phone call away, day or night," stated Burlak.