Case Study
Evans Distribution Systems, founded in 1929 as the Central Detroit Warehouse Company, has evolved into a full-service, third-party logistics provider offering warehousing, transportation, fulfillment, value added and staffing solutions. Its customers are in the automotive, manufacturing, food and beverage, consumer goods, and chemical industries. The company currently employs more than 600 associates and operates more than two million square feet of space in Michigan and across the US. As a full-service logistics company, Evans needs to be able to count on its data to be always available, protected, and future proof. Reliable application performance is even more critical during a busy shipping season.
Evans has large contracts with organizations that ship products seasonally. Planning ahead for its busiest time of year, Evans’ IT Director Dr. Michael Franklin wanted to proactively ensure that its systems would not experience any issues or downtime. Its current data center cloud provider did not provide dedicated support and the Evans’ IT department was resource constrained, so Dr. Franklin and the team decided to seek a new partner. The immediate need for a disaster recovery solution that was successfully tested prior to its high season drove the company to make a change.
Evans Distribution Systems selected Otava’s secure and compliant virtual private cloud hosting platform to protect its data and keep its systems running without disruption through its busiest shipping season and year round.
In addition to Otava’s compliant virtual cloud service, Evans’ environment also includes Cloud Backup and Otava-managed Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) to provide failover and recovery for 20 servers running shipping production, billing operations and other critical internal systems.
To ensure success during its busiest distribution months, Otava’s implemented its documented, tested and proven disaster recovery service prior to its most demanding season. Otava’s fully managed solution met Evans’ needs for rapid recovery, flexibility and testing availability.
“Evans is an established and well-respected logistics provider that is admired for its innovation. They recognized that migrating to a new cloud-based IT platform would ensure their critical workloads would be highly available and recoverable, even in the event of a disaster, ahead of their busiest shipping season,” said Brad Cheedle, CEO, Otava.
Otava’s Virtual Private Cloud, Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery services are providing Evans with reliable data protection for its shipping operations. It’s suite of managed cloud offering helps Evans to maximize its internal data center staff while ensuring optimal uptime and availability. Ultimately, Otava’s support allows Evans to meet its customer requirements while maintaining the performance levels and stability that they need.
Evans appreciates the value of Otava’s enterprise-class solution backed by expertise and ongoing support. It allows them to achieve their immediate needs quickly and cost effectively while providing sustainable management going forward. The Evans team now relies on Otava’s engineers and support staff to manage the cloud environment and data recovery services so that they can give their full attention to other needs of the business.
“Otava’s hybrid cloud solutions are fully managed by their team of experts, which gives us the confidence that we will avoid any potential costly disruption to our business and frees us up to focus on delivering excellent service to our customers,” said Michael Franklin, Ph.D., Director of IT, Evans Distribution Systems. “For businesses like ours that operate around the clock and in multiple time zones, having Otava on board as an extension of our IT team is essential. With the migration complete, we look forward to gaining valuable efficiency, productivity and reliability with Otava’s cloud.”
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Otava’s compliant and secure hybrid cloud offerings include shared cloud, reserved cloud and private cloud options. This portfolio along with its backup, security, disaster recovery and colocation solutions, all backed by a hands-on consultative approach to design, deployment and ongoing client care, simplify the cloud transformation journey organizations of all sizes. To learn more about how Otava’s solutions can support the needs of your organizations visit www.otava.com.
