Company Overview
TitleMax, Inc. is a consumer lending company headquartered in Savannah, GA. The company was founded in 1997 and launched with just two stores; one in Savannah and the other in Columbus, GA. Those initial two stores were a huge success and the company has since expanded to over 500 locations in five states. TitleMax now employs over 1,000 employees and is continuing to grow at a rapid pace as an established market leader.
Business Challenge
As TitleMax rapidly increased its store count, it was having difficulty managing and maintaining the computer infrastructure within each store. There was no centralized data center for managing critical systems nor was there a WAN for interconnecting the corporate office with the stores. The company wasn’t leveraging a consistent hardware and software build for store computers nor was it running the latest operating systems or productivity applications. In addition, TitleMax had needs for redundant data storage, disaster recovery, messaging, and core business applications.
Solution Approach
TitleMax hired Northridge to be its long-term strategic IT partner. Northridge completed a comprehensive IT assessment and provided TitleMax with a business case for specific IT initiatives to improve the overall health of the environment. Over several months Northridge delivered on the following key tasks:
- Design and deployment of a corporate WAN and Active Directory forest connecting 500 locations.
- Deployment of over 25 Windows Server 2003 rack-mount servers to deliver key infrastructure and application services.
- Design and implementation of a data center infrastructure to provide 99.999% uptime for major systems.
- Implementation of an EMC SAN for mission critical data storage including multiple LUN’s comprised of SCSI and SATA storage.
- Design and implementation of clustered SQL Server and clustered Exchange Server environments.
- Deployment of a high availability Cisco network mesh including redundant routers, firewalls, and switches.
- Implementation of BGP peering with diverse Tier 1 service providers.
Results Delivered
Northridge created an enterprise infrastructure for TitleMax that services the existing employees today and is scalable to thousands of additional employees. The infrastructure provides both a high-performance computing platform as well as one that is redundant and fault tolerant. TitleMax is now able to focus on its core business knowing that its critical systems and data are reliable, secure and efficient.