Hybrid IT solution—from crisis to recovery, and beyond

The history

Founded in 1969, Quantix (previously A&R Logistics) is the nation’s largest transporter of plastic resins, operating a nationwide fleet of 800 trucks, 1,200 trailers and an extensive network of 23 terminals and 10 warehousing/packaging facilities.

With a mission to grow quickly, neither Quantix nor its customers have room for downtime. “We have 750 drivers on the road, from San Diego to Boston and everywhere in between,” says Rick Blanchard, VP of Technology (Retired). “They need to know what products to load on their trucks, and where and when to deliver them. If a driver doesn’t show up on time with the right products, manufacturing operations can be forced to shut down for hours or longer.”

So when Quantix began experiencing unexplainable, catastrophic power problems in its Chicago-area data center, the Quantix team knew it had to act fast—and fail over its production IT environment to a high-performance disaster recovery infrastructure that would enable Quantix to provide uninterrupted service for customers.

The solution

Bulletproof IT at break-neck speed

Quantix began planning its failback to its production environment. Because the power problems in the Quantix data center persisted, Flexential proposed an alternative: recreate Quantix production environment at the Flexential colocation facility in Louisville, near Quantix corporate headquarters. Once again, Quantix was impressed with the speed, responsiveness and dedication of the Flexential team.

“One weekend, our Flexential team drove to the company’s Nashville - Franklin data center, picked up the server hardware we needed to recreate our environment, drove it to Louisville and had it set up by Monday morning,” said Blanchard. “This is the type of thing they did throughout the process.”

The results

A hybrid IT partner for foul or fair weather

Once the production environment was in place, Quantix and Flexential set up disaster recovery infrastructure in Atlanta, again using Flexential DRaaS. Just six months after declaring disaster, Quantix had recovered to the cloud, reestablished its production IT in a colocation facility and implemented a permanent remote disaster recovery as a service infrastructure. 

According to the team at Quantix, a company needn’t be in the depths of a crisis to benefit from a partner like Flexential. Blachard reiterated that for companies that want to go to the cloud for production or disaster recovery, and believe they don’t have the resources to do it, or know the next steps to take, Flexential is the solution. Having a partner with the expertise, dedication and ability to execute of Flexential is invaluable.