VetSource Case study
Optimizing Scalability, Elasticity, Performance, and Security for Rapid Business Growth
Vetsource, is a technology and pharmacy service provider for the veterinary industry serving over 15,000 national veterinary practices. They offer turnkey e-commerce capabilities, in-hospital prescription tools, and a high performance pharmacy that ships retail products and medications to customers nationwide.
Vetsource has occupied a co-hosted datacenter for the last decade. Recently, the company experienced significant growth that placed serious strain on their infrastructure. Specifically, management expressed difficulty purchasing servers to scale the systems as manufacturers and distributors were unable to fulfill orders in a timely manner. These factors restricted Vetsource’s scalability and elasticity as their infrastructure was simply unable to grow on parity with their business. Secondary incentives for cloud migration are lowered cost of maintenance and improvements in technical productivity.
Google Cloud Platform is a provider of cloud-based compute, networking, storage and big data services. For compute, they offer a range of services from infrastructure as a service where you manage your own virtual machine to serverless cloud functions where you write your own code leaving Google to manage scale. It is a fully integrated suite of cloud services that make it easier to build products and services.
Initially seeking to expand their local data center and handling all virtualization in-house, Vetsource began looking at cloud platforms as an alternative option when the initial plan fell short of meeting business requirements in a timely manner. GCP stood out because of their excellent customer service, attentive and helpful sales people, and incredible fiber optics network. Craig Sutter, Vetsource CTO, also credits GCP’s clean, simple and intuitive interface as a motivator to migrate to Google Cloud.
Since moving to the cloud, VetSource has reaped several clear benefits:
Given that Vetsource was constrained by their infrastructure, they were motivated to quickly move from their datacenter to GCP. Vetsource needed a partner for the journey, not just for the initial shift, and to assist them in reaching their goals of fast deployments and automation. GCP recommended Nortal due to its expertise in automation, experience as a Google Cloud Premier Partner, and its record of successfully modernizing infrastructure and platforms for dozens of mid-market and enterprise customers.
Nortal’s strategy encompassed migrating applications from Vetsource’s existing infrastructure to Google Cloud. When the project initiated, Nortal’s team discovered that Vetsource’s applications were compacted to maximize server utilization. This application coupling increased the complexity of the migration. In order to address the application stacking, Nortal teams first migrated the servers onto GCP using block-level migration tools, and implemented automation across the deployment process. Once the stacking was addressed, both Vetsource and Nortal teams had the flexibility to create multiple, right-sized machines for single purpose.
CloudEndure is an independent software vendor (ISV) focused on enterprise workload mobility. CloudEndure partnered with Nortal to live migrate Vetsource’s workloads on both Windows and Linux servers. Without disrupting any workflow, CloudEndure replicated the data in real-time and seamlessly cut over to the GCP target location.