The season of ghosts, goblins, and pumpkin-spiced everything is officially upon us. While not quite as terrifying as Pennywise the Dancing Clown from Stephen King’s “It”, the world of IT is not without its own particular frights. As any frazzled IT administrator knows too well, a looming crisis lurks in every corner and crevice of their environment - from power outages and system failures to stealth ransomware attacks, there’s no shortage of things that go bump in the night. So pour yourself a warm toddy and gather round to hear a few hair-raising tales from heroic IT professionals and how Scale Computing helped them sleep through the night.
Even the most fearless sysadmin is likely to break out into a cold sweat when they hear these two words: disaster recovery. As in, when a disaster strikes, how quickly can you recover all of your systems, applications, and data without disrupting your business operations. Todd Naveau, Network Systems Administrator for Filling Memorial Home, a non-profit care facility in Ohio, is responsible for ensuring their systems are always backed up in case a mischievous gremlin finds their way inside the network. But until finding Scale Computing, he was spending too much time and energy in disaster preparation panic mode: “Our time for managing backups has gone from two hours a week to zero. After the schedules are set there's no need to do anything else besides changing the schedule if your needs change.”
If you’ve ever spent time in one of those giant corn mazes, you’ve no doubt been disoriented by their complexity. When it came to navigating his organization’s frighteningly complex VDI infrastructure, John McKenna, the IT Director for Harlingen WaterWorks System in Southern Texas would often have to wait days to hear back from their VDI supplier for desperately needed support. Since becoming a Scale Computing customer, McKenna and his team never get ghosted by their support team and can rest easy: “now we just take it for granted. It’s not even a thought as to whether or not we’re going to have our computing assets available or not.”
You want to hear something really scary? How about an office full of lawyers who can’t get their work done because their applications and data aren’t available. For Dominique Chung, the IT Director for Chaitons LLP, a multi-practice law firm based in Toronto, this spectre of disaster seemed to always just be around the corner as they relied on a complex array of 50 server units to run a massive document management system and a multitude of SQL databases. Chung can now breathe a sigh of relief as he was able to replace all 50 units with a cluster of three HC3 nodes, “When it comes to the reliability and availability of data and applications, we now have peace of mind knowing we have full redundancy in production and from a business continuity perspective.”
Of course, who needs to worry about a zombie apocalypse when there’s an actual global pandemic wreaking havoc around the world. With more than 12,000 students and 1,200 full-time staff, the IT team at the New Albany-Floyd County Consolidated School Corporation in Indiana, had to pivot in record time in order to accommodate their new remote-first reality. However, because they had already migrated their legacy IT system to Scale Computing, they were able to deploy a remote desktop solution in just one hour and securely connect all of their staff to their network within just a few days.
And for our final tale of terror, you need to look no further than the stricken faces of those poor souls who have calculated the cost and endured the hardship of a VMware upgrade. “We presented the VMware option to management which would have been $180,000 just for the hardware at a single location…They had a mild stroke when they saw that number,” reported the IT Manager of Sevier Bank. Another former VMware customer was perhaps even more plain in his assessment saying that Scale Computing had “saved me from a VMware upgrade nightmare!”
Happy Halloween from all of us here at Scale Computing and may ice cream be the only scream you encounter this All Hallow’s Eve.