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Challenge

To reduce dependence on internal IT staff and reduce costs following Barewalls acquisition by Missouri Moulding and Glass (MMG), Inc.

Why eMax Hosting

Barewalls needed a high value, fully outsourced hosting solution for its unique search engine and cataloging system which drives its awarding-winning wall décor e-business.

Solution

Barewalls engaged Canada Web Hosting (CWH) to deploy, migrate, and manage a new hosting infrastructure in CWH's Toronto datacenter.  The system included advanced performance and high availability features and an expert technical account team to assume all network, Linux, Windows and Oracle administrations duties.

Key Benefit

• Increased operational efficiency and reduced costs by outsourcing IT component of Canadian division and centralizing operations.
• Barewalls now focuses on growing its core business knowing that all maintenance, reliability and performance issues related to its core business system are addressed by their technical account team.

Key eMax Components

• Enterprise ITIL Trained Technical Account Manager and Admin Team
• High Availability (Active/Passive) Cisco CSS Load Balancing Appliances
• Load Balanced Windows Application Servers (Dell PowerEdge 1425s)
• SQL Server Database Servers (Dell PowerEdge 6850)
• CommVault Backups to High Performance NAS Storage Device

Case study (pdf):   Download

Based in Sainte Genevieve, MO, Barewalls Interactive Art (barewalls.com) is a leading poster and print e-tailor. Started in 1997, Barewalls was one of the first companies to realize the potential of selling poster and prints online. Now, with more than 10 million visitors per year and over a quarter of a million prints in their catalog, barewalls.com is one of the Internet's most popular destinations for wall décor.  It offers a huge-range of imagery, ranging from expensive print-on-demand content to traditional art prints, as well as custom framing options.

Barewalls came to Canada Web Hosting (CWH) in early 2005 seeking a partner they could trust to take over the management of their core business application from their internal IT staff in Canada.  After a four month consulting and due diligence period, Barewalls migrated from a self-managed, co-location infrastructure with a large ISP to an eMax managed hosting environment with CWH.

The Power behind Barewalls.com eMax Solution

Barewalls' high powered hosting solution uses a global content delivery system fed by load balanced image caching servers to deliver millions of images quickly and efficiently to end users around the world.  Because images are hosted on Linux systems separate from the Windows application and Oracle database tiers, each hosted tier can be optimized on a software and hardware level to perform its specific function more efficiently and reliably.

All servers on the image and application tiers are behind high availability (active/passive) firewalls and load balancers.  This availability requirements but allows for excellent scalability.  To accommodate increased load on the website, servers can quickly be added to the existing load balanced image and application server clusters.  Redundancy and scalability are also engineered into the database tier where Oracle servers are configured to run in an active/standby configuration to eliminate all single point of failures at all tiers.  This redundancy extends to CWH's entire hosting infrastructure.

To ensure the integrity of the system and quick data recovery, Barewalls takes advantage of CWH's managed backup network powered by Syncsort's Backup Express enterprise-class backup software to a high performance NAS storage array rather than tape.

The real power behind Barewalls' complex hosting environment is their Technical Account Team at Canada Web Hosting.  Lead by their ITIL trained Technical Account Manager, this team manages every aspect of Barewalls mixed, Linux, Windows, Oracle hosting environment to keep Barewalls.com running at all times.

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