Collapsing Miles Through Technology

When you’re responsible for the uptime of PC’s and servers that are 1000km from a central site it’s not only about monitoring machines at that point; it’s also about remote resolution.

Dennis Evans, owner and president of Dennis Computers in Queensland, Australia, a system provider of Intel server and desktop solutions throughout the continent, manages instances of unanticipated downtime or issues through solutions provided by SyAM Software. The company’s System Area Manager is the product of choice for SMBs who need an affordable, easy-to-use, easy to learn systems management tool for managing servers, PCI RAID storage systems, desktops, and notebooks.

“What’s key for my clients is catching issues before they became problems, being proactive, rather than reactive,” said Dennis. “For example, for one of my client’s sites I got an urgent email from a device installed with System Area Manager. I got on the phone with the client and told them their hard drive was about to fail. Sure enough, during our conservation the hard drive did just that.”

Dennis, who builds solutions for desktops and servers and then manages them, including their storage requirements, supports a range of customers, some of whom have as few as 3 PCs to as many as 600 in schools, including medical institutions, hospitals, doctors’ offices and petrol station chains.

As such Dennis manages all aspects of his clients’ IT function areas including backup and system availability.

“That particular site – the one where the hard drive failed – had a single IT technician on staff. While the technician supports the desktops, I manage all of the integration and backend system support,” said Dennis. “For most clients that’s a value-add they find especially helpful.”

Good Things Come In Three: Monitoring, Alerting, Remote Resolution

Dennis manages these sites with a triad of SyAM Software solutions including monitoring, alerting and remote resolution. These include:

SyAM Software’s systems level monitoring tracks fan speeds, temperature, voltage power redundancy, single-bit and multi-bit memory module errors, network connectivity and physical intrusions. This allows administrators to know if users are adding applications or hardware devices that may be causing issues.

SyAM Software’s alerting capabilities allow administrators to choose the best course of action to resolve issues. . While the monitoring features noted above track system parameters, the alerting functions notify administrators when operations exceed definable thresholds. Alerts at the system level can be sent to email, SMS/pager, the central event log, SNMP, and system event log (MOM).

Finally –remote resolution capabilities impacts the productivity of administrators by reducing or eliminating the need for desk-side visits. Administrators can literally “take over” a machine at the keyboard, video, mouse level and reconfigure systems properly, a feature Dennis has used and is infinitely grateful in having.

Importantly, remote resolution and intervention is a key to Dennis’ success in the SMB space.

“One of my newest clients is a petrol station chain, which has locations that vary from as far as 400km south of my site to nearly 400km north,” explained Dennis. “To support server and system uptime they use multiple private networks that converge in a central hub. With SyAM incorporated into those systems they can now manage their entire network from that central hub to their remote locations without having to physically drive to each office. SyAM is not only a problem solver; it’s a time-saver.”

Managing Storage, Saving Power

Dennis has also leveraged SyAM’s storage management capabilities, reducing complexity by allowing all PCI RAID systems to be managed through a single console.

“One of my clients has 35 sites and 5 servers and it became quite evident, through SyAM, that the workstations didn’t have enough hard drive space or, for that matter, RAID. They were constantly at 95% capacity. Using SyAM, I recommended adding more RAM into the systems and optimizing their RAID configuration. Their performance as well as capacity increased accordingly,”

In addition to relating to clients his ability to proactively monitor systems Dennis also has the benefit of leveraging SyAM’s Power Management solution – which allows administrators to shut down servers and PC’s when they’re not needed, saving energy as well as dollars.

System Area Manager’s Power Management capabilities can help reduce a company’s power consumption by as much as 40% or more. It allows administrators to create power policies for desktops and notebooks and enforce them without any intervention by end-users.

“PCs are sometimes left on for maintenance updates as well as monitoring their availability,” said Dennis. “When that’s complete and the administrators leave they can now turn their PC’s off. They can also, through SyAM, schedule them to turn back on, as needed.”

In addition to power management, SyAM Software's Management Utility allows him to easily deploy the software to customer sites, remotely patch systems and update BIOS versions.

Dennis not only benefits from monitoring client systems remotely, but also being able to market SyAM directly to those clients who prefer to monitor their systems themselves.

“For doctors’ offices, for example, which typically do not have a full-time technician on staff, remote monitoring and management is cost-effective,” said Dennis. “The petrol stations, on the other hand use SyAM to monitor themselves, in a large part because they have the manpower on staff . In many ways it’s a win-win situation for both.”

vPro In Its Sights

Most recently Dennis began using SyAM Software and Intel® vPro™ Technology solutions which furthers his remote management capabilities because of the power that the Intel® vPro™ technology brings.

“We’re just now experimenting with remotely ‘pushing out’ images, especially out to the petrol stations, rather than driving them out to the individual sites. That way, once they traverse the private network the images are received and captured locally, accelerating, among other benefits, remote resolution.”

He added, “To be competitive as a system provider requires the ability to do more for clients than simple break/fix,” said Dennis. “Having SyAM System Area Manager be a part of the services I can offer clients – complete with its end-to-end visibility for their servers, systems, and PCs – ensures their peace of mind as well as my own success. There’s quite simply nothing else like it out there today.”

About Dennis Computers

Dennis’ Computers is an Intel Certified Server and Systems builder, mainly specializing in the sale, implementation and support of servers, storage and workstations for small to large networks. The company also builds servers, storage solutions and workstations for several other IT companies in the region. As VMWare partner we are moving clients to ESX solutions which require a SAN/NAS for Vmotion/HA/DRS and DR. For more information visit: www.den-computers.com.au