Success Stories

NorthStar Battery Company LLC Partners with AOS to Implement EMC SAN Solution

NorthStar Battery Company LLC, located in Springfield, MO, manufactures reliable, high‐quality battery products with the most advanced lead‐acid battery manufacturing equipment operating in the world. Their state‐of‐the‐art facility, located on 18 acres and encompassing 255,000 square feet, houses technologically advanced environmental systems, making certain the water and air processed through their facility departs in an even cleaner condition than when it entered. Formed in June 2000 for the purpose of establishing a new industrial battery business, NorthStar Battery employs approximately 400 workers that service the global standby battery markets. Representing over 100 years of collective experience in the designing of and manufacturing of lead‐acid batteries, NorthStar Battery has three overriding goals:

• Manufacture the most reliable batteries in the market
• Provide a level of unparalleled customer service
• Continue to develop innovative, leading‐edge products

Since the company was in the process of building a second plant along with another datacenter for disaster recovery, Alexander Open Systems (AOS) was challenged with designing a redundant SAN solution to replace NorthStar Battery’s existing SAN. Jason Neeley, NorthStar Battery’s IT Manager, needed a solution that would provide better performance and reliability for their virtualization needs. “NorthStar Battery is a 24/7 manufacturing company but didn’t have a network or systems infrastructure that could operate at that level.”

The company had already implemented VMware for virtualization of their server environment and was looking to add desktop virtualization through VMware View but was uncomfortable deploying it on their existing SAN. Jason stated, “After looking at our current infrastructure and expected growth, we implemented VMware View, ESX,and redundant SANs. The current environment is [now] scalable and fully redundant, allowing NorthStar Battery to respond in many cases the same day to new server and workstation requests.”

AOS provided NorthStar Battery with an EMC SAN solution that will grow well with the company while providing much needed improved performance and reliability. “Before, we ran an IT operation that was at best up 95% of the time. I can now safely say we are a 5 9’s operation. I’ve gone from getting phone calls 2 and 3 times per night to 2‐3 in a month,” commented Jason. The new SAN infrastructure allowed NorthStar Battery to utilize both fiber channel and SATA drives as well as SAN based replication for disaster recovery. The improved reliability and performance allowed NorthStar Battery to grow their virtualization environment with piece of mind.

“I know when I need help, AOS has the resources to complete the job, and in almost every case, we get a better solution than expected.”