In 2011, C.H. Spencer & Co., a supplier of pumps and related equipment to mining, power, industrial and municipal markets, was looking for a way to cut business operating and hardware costs. Company executives knew they wanted to scale back the number of servers and hardware needed to run the business, but they didn’t have the in-house expertise to handle the transition.
Enter i.t.NOW.
i.t.NOW is a Utah-based provider of I.T. solutions including virtualization, data backup and recovery, cloud computing and more. The company’s virtualization solution gives small businesses the ability to decrease in-house operating and hardware costs, and reduce the number of needed servers and computers, and hardware and software upgrades.
For C.H. Spencer & Co., the staff at i.t.NOW developed a custom virtualization plan.
First, i.t.NOW decreased the number of in-house servers from four to one, with one server now running four virtual machines. This move saved C.H. Spencer & Co. an estimated $17,000 in hardware costs, upgrades, warranties and maintenance over the life of the machines, which typically last three to five years.
Second, because of the decreased power consumption, C.H. Spencer & Co. will see significant savings. On average, each server that C.H. Spencer & Co. used cost $300 per year in electricity, a total of $1,200 per year for all four servers. With the new single, virtualized server from i.t.NOW, electrical costs will average less than $300.
Finally, i.t.NOW’s services gave C.H. Spencer & Co. technology that will scale with its growth. With virtualization, tasks like memory addition and data migration become more simple and cost-effective.
“Our transition to a virtualized office was pretty seamless. We compared three different I.T. companies, and ended up choosing i.t.NOW because it had the most comprehensive virtualization services. We started the switch the Friday after Thanksgiving, and i.t.NOW had us back up and running by Monday. They were there to help with any additional needs whenever we needed them. They also helped upgrade two of our core software programs at the same time. We even installed i.t.NOW’s data backup and recovery system, i.t.BDR, and that’s helped us recover lost data at a moment’s notice,” said Randy Burgoyne, controller for C.H. Spencer & Co.
“We started looking at a variety of options for expanding our servers. We wanted good, solid hardware. We had three dell servers, and an 800 gig array of storage space. When it came down to it, we wanted to compare prices. We got bids from three places, and we felt that i.t.NOW had the best total solution. They mirrored our entire server environment, and cut us back to one machine using VM Ware. The implementation went very smoothly. We also upgraded two of our core operating programs at the same time. It was a large undertaking, but i.t.NOW handled it well.
Implemented the Friday after Thanksgiving. i.t.NOW had our server up before the transition, and we were up and running again on Monday, and were ready to handle any additional problems throughout the next few days. They also expanded our storage, and we also installed an i.t.BDR unit that has been seamless as well.”
To learn more about i.t.NOW and its comprehensive I.T. services, call (801) 562-8778 or contact us using our online form.
