Market OpportunityDunlap and Kyle Company, Inc. is a leading wholesale and retail tire dealer doing business as Gateway Tire & Service Center, with 70 locations (52 retail and 18 wholesale distribution centers) in nine states spanning from the Ohio/Pennsylvania border to the Rio Grande in Texas. Founded in 1929 in Batesville, Mississippi, Dunlap and Kyle has grown steadily over the years through both acquisition and organic growth. More recently, the company has been focused on expanding its multi-state network of wholesale tire distribution centers.

Dunlap and Kyle relies upon a small internal IT staff led by CIO Stuart Hill to keep both its retail and wholesale distribution businesses up and running. Before migrating its production environment to Expedient’s Memphis data center, the company supported the IT needs of its employees and various locations with centralized IT infrastructure hosted at its Batesville headquarters. To create a secondary site for replication and backups, Dunlap and Kyle built out its own disaster recovery site at one of its locations in Texas.

Dunlap and Kyle Company maximizes the uptime and performance of its mission-critical applications with IaaS and DRaaS from Expedient

The Outcome You’re Looking For®

I N F R A S T R U C T U R E

Cloud

Colocation

Connectivity

M A N A G E D S E R V I C E S

Disaster Recovery as a Service

Dedicated Firewall

Dedicated Load Balancing

Enterprise Backup Service

Hosted Dedicated Firewall Failover

Hosted Dedicated Load Balancer Failover

S E R V I C E S

Retail

Outcomes

The ChallengeWhile Dunlap and Kyle had implemented a DIY disaster recovery solution to protect its IT environment, the centralized nature of its legacy RS/6000-based system left the company vulnerable to IT downtime. Knowing that he needed to set the stage for a hardware refresh that would better support the growing business, Hill began looking into the possibility of building out an entirely new on-premises data center. However, once a total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis was completed, it became clear that this approach would be neither cost effective nor strategic for Dunlap and Kyle.

At this point, Hill pivoted to a software architecture approach to tackle the IT challenge from another angle. Guided by this new strategy, Hill was able to negate the obstacle of centralization that required Dunlap and Kyle to fund and manage an on-site data center. To realize a decentralized server environment, Hill decided to migrate the company’s IT environment to the Microsoft Dynamics platform, which required a shift from an AIX-based OS running on an Oracle database to a Windows SQL database with Microsoft Servers. Once Hill made the decision to go with the Microsoft Dynamics platform, the next step was to find a colocation facility to host the new equipment and environment.

The SolutionAfter evaluating several regional data centers close to Dunlap and Kyle’s headquarters in northwest Mississippi, Hill zeroed in on Expedient as the front runner to host the company’s hardware.

“We certainly considered other data centers, but we found Expedient to be more flexible and accommodating than other options,” Hill said. “The Expedient team went above and beyond to tailor the solution that addressed our unique business needs.”

“Before we were even a customer, Expedient’s technical experts were already giving us guidance and technical advice,” he explained. “Expedient’s willingness to work as a team with us toward a common goal is what differentiated them from the other solution providers we were considering.”

Expedient’s dedication to building its Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and managed services solutions with best-of-breed technology was also an important factor in Dunlap and Kyle’s vendor selection process.

“Expedient leverages most of the technology that we were looking to adopt to support the move to the Microsoft Dynamics platform,” Hill explained. “We were already using VMware on top of DellEMC hardware. Plus, Expedient also uses Zerto, which was a vendor that was on our technology roadmap for disaster recovery.”

While Hill was originally going to enlist Expedient only as a colocation provider for the company’s new DR infrastructure, he decided to migrate Dunlap and Kyle’s entire production environment to Expedient’s cloud and then use a second Expedient site as the replication target for failover.

“After learning about the full spectrum of services that Expedient offered, it made the most sense from both a cost and expertise standpoint to move all of the mission critical workloads

The Outcome You’re Looking For®Retail

in our production environment to Expedient’s fully managed IaaS offering,” Hill explained. “Now that we’ve augmented our IT staff with Expedient’s knowledge and expertise, we can concentrate our efforts on optimizing our business rather than worrying about managing and maintaining IT infrastructure. Why would we want to recreate the wheel?”

The Results

By electing to migrate Dunlap and Kyle’s entire production environment to Expedient’s cloud, Hill created several strategic advantages for the company with the most impactful being the guaranteed system uptime its new business processes demanded.

“Our new software model requires greater than 99% uptime, so our window for outages is narrower than it used to be,” Hill explained. “This includes scheduled maintenance, backups and unplanned outages. We worked with Expedient to come up with a solution in which we attached our own Meraki appliance to a dedicated circuit between Expedient’s data center and our headquarters in Batesville. This allows us to provide VPN failover to all 70 locations.”

“I don’t know of any greater strategic advantage than uptime in excess of 99 percent,” he continued. “Because of our cloud and DR solution with Expedient, our ability to meet customer demand and grow the various aspects of our business has noticeably increased. It has been very beneficial for Dunlap and Kyle.”

About Expedient

Expedient is a cloud and data center infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider with local operations in Pittsburgh, PA; Baltimore, MD; Boston, MA; Cleveland, OH; Columbus, OH; Indianapolis, IN and Memphis, TN. Ranked as one of the Top 10 managed services providers worldwide on the Channel Futures MSP 501 list, Expedient’s converged solutions enable clients to focus on strategic business innovation, while the Expedient team handles operation of the information technology needed to support it. Expedient data centers are compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) as well as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Service Organization Control (SOC) reports are published annually for all locations. Learn more at expedient.com.

About Dunlap and Kyle Company, Inc.Founded in 1929 in Batesville, MS, Dunlap and Kyle Company, Inc. owns and operates both wholesale tire distribution centers and retail outlets in nine states. The company has 18 distribution centers and 52 retail stores, which do business as Gateway Tire & Service Centers.

The Outcome You’re Looking For®Retail

Outcomes

“Because of our cloud and DR solution with Expedient, our ability to meet customer demand and grow the various

aspects of our business has noticeably increased. It has been very beneficial for Dunlap and Kyle.”

-Stuart Hill, cIO, Dunlap and Kyle Company, inc.

O U T C O M E S D E L I V E R E D D I F F E R E N T I A T O R S

NATIONAL CAPABILITY, LOCAL SERVICE

Dunlap and Kyle appreciated the fact that Expedient’s Memphis data center was close to its headquarters, and

also valued the geographic diversity of Expedient’s multi-regional footprint for disaster recovery purposes.

TECHNOLOGYExpedient’s adoption of leading hardware and software

such as VMware, DellEMC, and Zerto allowed Dunlap and Kyle to leverage existing skill sets.

OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCEImpressed with Expedient’s technical expertise and

solution-minded focus, Hill decided to move all of Dunlap and Kyle’s mission-critical enterprise applications to

Expedient’s fully managed cloud solution.

RISK MITIGATIONDunlap and Kyle leverages Expedient’s Push Button DR

solution to instill redundancy into its mission critical enterprise applications.

COST CONTROLBy taking advantage of Expedient’s top-notch infrastructure and industry-leading technical resources, Dunlap and Kyle avoided substantial CAPEX costs and did not have to hire

and train additional IT staff.

CAPACITYWhen Dunlap and Kyle needed to add new servers and RAM to its computing environment, Expedient engineers helped the company reclaim some trapped data storage assets by

reallocating existing resources.

AVAILABILITYBacked by Expedient’s 100% SLA, Dunlap and Kyle is able to support the stringent availability demands of its new

enterprise software model.

Expedient offers a 100% service level agreement (SLA). To learn more, please see expedient.com or contact us at 877-570-7827.

AGILITY

Expedient works as an extension of Dunlap and Kyle’s on-premises data center, allowing the company to scale its

IT infrastructure as needed.

Retail

Outcomes