The Steak n Shake Company, Indianapolis, IN
Adding Colocation to the Menu
When you have 450 Steak n Shake restaurants operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week in 19 states, it's critical that your IT applications are always up and running. However, when your headquarters is a historic building that's anything but IT-friendly, up-time can be a challenge. "We were constantly pumping money into our facility, trying to build a world-class data center," says Jan Binhack, Manager, Enterprise Architecture for The Steak n Shake Company. "We had power going out, water being turned off. We had servers go down and we couldn't get in the building because the keycard locks were unreliable."
The answer? Moving critical IT functions to a new facility. "We started looking at Fibertech because we were going to move into a co-location facility," says Binhack. "We were going to move just one application to this facility that had everything we wanted, but then we decided to just move everything there, and then co-locate back to our corporate office and it would be the standby."
Completing the order.
After moving almost all their IT functions to the new facility, including business intelligence, payroll and general ledger applications, as well as Internet access, a new question arose, says Binhack. "We wanted to know, how can we keep the connection up between us and that facility? What's the most reliable way to do that? And that's when dark fiber came in."
Fortunately for Steak n Shake, Fibertech's extensive Indianapolis-area dark fiber network was perfectly positioned to connect their head office and new data center. All with the kind of high bandwidth that made that connection virtually seamless. "It's basically made our co-location facility the same as if we were there. We don't really realize it's in another location," Binhack says.
Greater flexibility. Tastier SLAs.
Their new IT infrastructure also gives the folks at Steak n Shake headquarters more flexibility, she says. "It allows us to move or take our corporate headquarters offline without affecting our other locations."
In addition to the flexibility to handle whatever tomorrow may bring, today Steak n Shake is enjoying better performance and improved SLAs. All thanks to a new co-location facility-and the reliability of its connectivity through Fibertech Networks.
"We wanted to know how to keep the connection up between us and our new data center. That's where dark fiber came in."
Jan Binhack, Manager, Enterprise Architecture, The Steak N Shake Company