Customer

One of the great opportunities about my job is that I get to travel onsite to customer locations, usually capture their story on video video . Earlier this year, I had the experience of traveling to Maine via Boston in the middle of winter - rough for a Texan! With my director, Arlette, in tow, we packed up the car in Boston and drove about 3.5 hours until we arrived in Lewiston, home of Northeast Bank.

The next day we were up bright and early -- and after scraping the ice off the rental car, we were on our way! The Northeast Bank employees were such gracious hosts to have Dell onsite, especially with all our video equipment. After spending the morning with members of the IT department, Greg and Drew, their IT challenges were real to me.

Reducing complexity and enabling employees to do their jobs more efficiently are two of the most important goals of the eight-person IT staff.

“All the regulations that apply to big banks apply to us, and we perform the same due diligence and the same compliance. The major difference is that we don’t have deep pockets. A dollar that we spend has to serve the greater good of the company and the communities we serve,” said Greg Thompson, vide president, Northeast Bank.

By using virtualization technology they were able to virtualize up to 50 servers using PowerEdge 2950 servers. An important part of that value proposition is the virtualized storage that the bank acquired with Dell EqualLogic PS5000XV and PS5000E iSCSI SAN arrays. By refreshing their technology the company saved 25-30 percent of its utility costs for power and cooling and avoided the cost of having to buy another cooling unit for the data center.

It’s a great experience for me to see how technology enables businesses to become more efficient. Despite the cold, this Texan soon realized how gorgeous the winter can be in Maine. Maybe next time, I’ll go when it’s a little warmer!

Recently, I went to lunch with some great folks from Liaison Resources, a local creative and marketing staffing firm. They provided me with a contractor that has worked on my team for over a year now, and she’s stellar. That said, I gather that finding stellar workers isn’t always easy to pull off. I heard some pretty interesting stories about sloppy applications and even sloppier wardrobe choices. Some of the stories made me laugh and others made me really glad I wasn’t challenged with the things they face on a regular basis.

Soon after I got back to the office, I saw a new case study on Hays Recruitment, a firm that also provides permanent, temporary or interim staff, but on a global scale. I gave the story a read and learned that they face a lot of the same types of challenges I had just heard about in person – only bigger because of their size and worldwide reach. They need to be able to quickly access in-depth information on potential candidates so they can keep pace with last year’s achievement of placing nearly 400,000 temporary and permanent workers. 

To access that information quickly, Hays chose to refresh their aging, slow desktop infrastructure with a standardized environment on Dell OptiPlex desktops with Hardware Customization and ProSupport. And it was no small task. 2,500 PCs had to be replaced and another 2,000 refreshed throughout 250 remote offices. But it was well worth it. Not only do employees now have quicker, more efficient access to their data and to one another, but hardware calls to the IT helpdesk are down by 40 percent and they are saving 75 percent on maintenance costs. Cool.

I know recruiters aren’t always perfect, but it was awesome to hear about both a small/local and a large/global agency getting a lot of stuff right. Let me hear your staffing stories, temporary, permanent, good or bad. They’re almost always entertaining!

I used to have a Kyocera phone. I liked it well enough, but since my account is with Verizon and they don’t carry that brand anymore, I have since migrated to a LG’s enV(2). But when I had the chance to check out what Kyocera is doing in their IT department, it got me thinking about my old phone again, and wondering if I should try to get a new one. The business decisions Kyocera are making seem to be pretty smart, so I’m betting their phones are too.

Recently, they were investigating new ways to meet customer demand for their communications services, and they turned to Dell to help them design a solution. They came up with a virtualized infrastructure using VMware and PowerEdge R805 servers. And for storage, they chose Dell EqualLogic PS5000 Series SAN arrays.

By now you’re thinking, so what? Unless you get really geeked out about technical stuff, you probably don’t really care much what’s behind the IT curtain, right? Well hang with me a minute longer because it’s about to get interesting.

See, I think that companies who are figuring out new ways to save money, be more streamlined and more standardized are the kinds of companies I want to buy from - and buy stock from. The old school companies who are all about doing things they way they always did are the ones who are going to tank. Kyocera revised it’s IT, turned a high opex department into a low opex department, and saved the company a ton of money annually.

I think that rocks and I think other companies should be doing the same. Don’t you?

World Environment Day was June 5 and I thought it was only fitting that we highlight a customer who is committed to keeping their company green and providing technology to help their customers save energy as well. Atlanta-based Southern Company is the premier energy provider of the Southeast, serving over 4.4 million customers. While the company is committed to be green, they were seeing their kilowatt hour consumption grow by as much as 15 percent and producing more of the corresponding CO2 emissions every year because their own data center.

By instituting a green data center program, the IT team at Southern realized they needed to do something to stop the server sprawl and energy consumption. By virtualizing and consolidating its data center servers using VMware ESX technology on PowerEdge R900 servers, Southern has eliminated over 1,340 tons of CO2 emissions.

“As a result of the virtualization, we avoided more than two million kilowatt hours worth approximately $200,000 over a period of a year and a half,” says Dan Traynor, IT infrastructure director, Southern Company. In the process, they were also able to put a little money back in their pockets to the tune of $1.3 million by not having to add new equipment in their datacenter. That was a huge savings, especially with many organizations trying to extend the life of their equipment.

Read more on Southern Company and how they leveraged technology to be greener. To learn more about Dell and their commitment to the environment, go to Dell Earth.

What “cool” things is your organization doing to be green in the data center? I’d love to hear your stories!

As you may recall, I published a post a few weeks ago about Dell's involvement in the launch of Wolfram Alpha, a computational search engine that is built on servers from Dell's Data Center Solutions team.

In this video, R Systems' CEO Brian Kucic outlines the infrastructure behind Wolfram Alpha and how it was built out in less than two weeks.

Brian says the cluster, called R Smarr, is the fastest privately owned cluster in the U.S., the fifth fastest Dell cluster in the U.S. and the 44th fastest supercomputer in the world (according to the June 2008 Top 500 list).

Wolfram also did a post on their deployment over on their blog today. The post is titled "Building Rome in a Day," appropriate for the significant amount of work that was done to bring their supercomputer online in such a short period of time.