The American Red Cross is a 24/7/365 business, and not a day goes by without collecting and distributing blood products. At the same time, it must be prepared to respond to unforeseen events on a moment's notice. Like any major organization, the Red Cross faces challenges upgrading and maintaining the infrastructure behind such critical service delivery.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Red Cross began to devise a new IT transformation plan, which identified critical technology issues within the corporate organization, from service delivery for the blood supply to humanitarian and disaster-relief efforts and basic office applications. Its Virginia based data center was out of capacity.

The Red Cross selected CSC to provide managed services. CSC took over data center operations and began a nine-month project to relocate Red Cross servers and associated storage and backup equipment to CSC's "industrial strength" data center (CDC) in Chicago. The decision to move to the CDC would provide the organization with a state-of-the-industry data center with ample power, cooling and space. CSC would also provide proactive monitoring to alert staff to impending failures and robust processes to resolve failures as well as more detailed information of the asset inventory, and documented shutdown and startup procedures for each server that was moved. Learn more.