With so much of its business activity connected to technology nowadays, AutoNation made a move to ensure its customers can easily connect with its dealerships, and employees can complete work via the solutions they need.

Flexential, a hybrid IT infrastructure provider, announced the recent deployment of a high-density Disaster Recovery environment for AutoNation. The dealer group chose to house its DR environment within Flexential’s data center in Texas.

Combining the expertise of its people with state of the art infrastructure, Flexential said it helped AutoNation overcome a significant, time-intensive IT challenge faced by many organizations today.

“As a large enterprise, we recognize that investing in DR is critical to our core operations,” said Adam Rasner, senior director of IT operations and infrastructure at AutoNation.

“If our applications and data aren’t available, we can’t deliver for our customers,” Rasner continued.

Before turning to Flexential to fulfill its DR requirements, AutoNation moved its IT infrastructure into the public cloud. During testing, officials indicated that the dealer group quickly realized that its application and data needs required too much horsepower and were too expensive to operate in the cloud.

AutoNation recognized it needed a third-party colocation and DR provider with industry-leading power and cooling capacity that could accommodate its equipment within a small footprint to reduce costs. AutoNation toured several providers’ facilities, and ultimately chose Flexential.

“Flexential achieved for us what few providers could: a high-density DR environment at one of its newest and most innovative data centers,” Rasner said.

“The facility’s capabilities, coupled with the team’s expertise and flexibility, helped us take an original design of close to 20 cabinets at 5kW per cabinet and optimize that to seven cabinets at almost 20kW per cabinet — delivering the ability to scale our environment very cost-effectively as we continue to grow our business,” he went on to say.

To demonstrate this high-density capability to enterprises, the Flexential Texas data center features a test bed that showcases the ability to support high-density, hyper-converged server deployments. The facility is one of the company’s 41 data centers spanning the US, connected by a 100Gbps network backbone delivering network options and interconnection capabilities that extend to hundreds of global carrier offerings.

“AutoNation chose one of our most innovative and technologically advanced facilities, supporting density levels up to 2,000 watts per square foot,” said Tom Myers, regional vice president at Flexential.

“This is attractive for high-growth companies who require a small, dense physical footprint that enables them to cost-effectively scale their IT environment,” Myers added.

“We are glad our team and facility earned the trust and confidence of AutoNation,” Myers went on to say. “We look forward to helping support its business operations and enable further growth.”