Company mergers and acquisitions often strain storage, server, and IT resources, potentially endangering access to applications that are the company’s lifeblood. Such was the case with AlphaStaff, a human resources (HR) outsourcing company, and of Jack Rahner, VP of technology for the Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.-based company.

When AlphaStaff acquired another Florida-based HR staffing company in 2009, it grew its business from handling HR services for 6,000 people to more than 80,000 staffers. The extra business completely overwhelmed its LeftHand storage area network and its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Plus, in the five years since they had bought the LeftHand system, the company’s data had grown from a manageable 1 TB to over 60 TB of storage.

Rahner knew he had a problem. Addressing capacity and then performance were his major concerns. Employees were complaining that they could not access the ERP and business intelligence applications without delays. These two applications were the lifeblood of AlphaStaff’s business, allowing them to process payroll and manage an employee’s benefits. In addition, Rahner and his team had started virtualizing the servers within AlphaStaff using VMware and in doing so, added an additional tax on the storage system.

“Everything was getting virtualized and we were getting the most out of our hardware,” says Rahner. “I started to realize, though, that the weakest link was capacity. And, now that has taken a backseat to disk speed. We started saturating the network and were having bandwidth issues.”

So Rahner started looking for a storage system to replace the LeftHand system he had. He looked at EMC and NetApp and finally chose Compellent, which was 60% faster than his previous storage area network (SAN). Then he connected his legacy ERP and business intelligence applications to the Compellent Storage Center SAN. It came equipped with three tiers of storage: solid state drives (SSDs), 15,000 RPM Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives, and 10,000 RPM SAS drives.

“We are moving our ERP system and business intelligence system over to solid state drives for one reason: latency,” said Rahner. “When you are dealing with very high transactions or applications that are very database-intensive and require lots of serving of disk, solid state drives make a major difference.”

As a result of the SSDs, “we had our latency go from 10 milliseconds a transaction at 10,000 [I/O operations per second] to one millisecond overnight,” said Rahner.
Through testing of the ERP system with the Compellent Storage Center SAN, Rahner determined that there was an 80% performance improvement for the ERP system.
Rahner’s use of SSDs in his Compellent Storage Center SAN also garnered other business benefits.

“Because everything is virtualized and running on VMware, we were seeing performance from [our business intelligence application] that was less than optimal. Our customers were waiting 10 seconds or more to get information they needed. Going to SSDs made a world of difference.”

Source:http://www.informationweek.com/news/232200173

IT company Lexel Systems Limited has won an award for outstanding customer service at the Westpac Auckland North Business Awards 2011.

The Albany-based company, New Zealand’s largest privately owned provider of ICT services and solutions to business, government and education customers, won the Mitre10 Excellence in Service Delivery Award impressing judges with its service integration throughout the business.

Judges highlighted Lexel’s impressive growth in an industry that has shrunk significantly in the last three years and attributed this success to its excellent customer service and techniques to measure performance.

“It is very rare to see service measured this accurately, this often and this comprehensively and then have it integrated right throughout the business,” says Convenor of Judges, Matthew Bellingham.

Lexel specialises in solution consulting, infrastructure design, implementation, project management, business analysis, outsourcing, support services and procurement. These services can be used individually or bundled together to form turnkey solutions for projects.

Lexel System’s CEO, Noel Simpson, says that the company focuses on maximising the business performance of customers through industry leading expertise and world class solutions.

“Creating a culture of excellence at Lexel is a key part of our business strategy. At a tactical level, it has been critical that we report and reward individual staff in delivering on just that. We have developed and refined key systems and processes across the entire business that rewards exceptional delivery. Our Project Services VBRS? automated scorecard system is one the latest outcomes of that strategy,” says Mr Simpson.

Ngaio Merrick, Manager Business Development – North for Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development says that service is the ultimate business function to get right.

“Service delivery is crucial to all businesses; winning client loyalty is a critical ingredient for retaining clients and growing profitability. Congratulations to Lexel Systems Limited who clearly understand this philosophy,” says Ms Merrick.

The annual Westpac Auckland North Business Awards celebrates excellence in the local business community and honours successful companies across 12 awards categories.

Source:http://www.voxy.co.nz/business/service-delivery-winner-it-company/5/100621