The Challenge
Scott Data runs a 20-acre campus in Omaha, Nebraska holding 110,000 square feet of purpose-built, Tier III certified data center space, a 20-MegaWatt central plant, high-density cabinets, and colocation services. It is one of only fourteen multi-tenant organizations in the nation to hold Tier III Certification in both design and facility from the Uptime Institute. The network had to meet the same concurrently maintainable standard as the building, and it had to do that without the procurement and cost drag of a legacy single-vendor stack.
- Long equipment lead times from closed-system vendors slowed network buildouts.
- Required budgets for traditional vendor solutions were significantly higher than open alternatives.
- The roadmap called for a logical evolution from mainframe computing toward future cloud computing.
The Solution
Scott Data picked OcNOS and an open networking strategy to serve the network it has and the growth it expects. One operating system now spans merchant-silicon platforms built by UfiSpace, Edgecore Networks, and Celestica, in place of the closed stacks the campus would otherwise have bought. Technology partner IP ArchiTechs provided essential deployment support, and the architecture matches Scott Data’s wider intent to keep the network open so cost, support, and features all stay negotiable.
Outcomes
- Buildouts move at project speed. Switches that once took years to arrive now land in weeks, so a new cabinet row or a capacity bump is scheduled against customer demand instead of a vendor backlog.
- Budget freed for capacity. Closed-system proposals came in at a multiple of the open design, and the difference buys ports and redundancy inside the same spend.
- Supplier risk spread across three vendors. Because UfiSpace, Edgecore Networks, and Celestica hardware all run the same operating system, one roadmap change or one shortage cannot stall the campus.
- Ready for the next platform shift. The same network carries Scott Data from mainframe computing toward the cloud computing services on its roadmap, with no second migration to fund.
Why OcNOS
As Ken Moreano, Co-Founder, President, and CEO of Scott Data, put it: “OcNOS and an open networking strategy hits all the right notes in terms of cost, support, and features. Service providers and OEMs have been using IP Infusion for years.” The selection reaffirms Scott Data’s stated core values of being a technical innovator in its market while channeling net revenues toward STEM college scholarships, a defining feature of the company founded by Walter Scott, Jr.