Baker Business Systems - profile of Xsigo Systems customer

I spoke with Marvin Baker, CEO of Baker Business Systems LLC. He wanted to let me know how his company was using Xsigo System 's I/O virtualization products.

Please tell me who you are and what your organization does

Baker Business Systems, LLC is the premier provider for infrastructure, training and support for the automobile physical damage market in the Midwest. With over 20 years experience providing solutions to this market, the company now offers innovative SaaS solutions to help customers manage the growing complexity of this market. I'm the CEO of the company.

What are you doing that needed this technology?

In the past we've sold hub and spoke type of computing solutions to small organizations. As the technology improved, it was possible for us to host their entire computing environment in virtual machines on our IT infrastructure. They can access their computing solution using a Wyse thin client. The customers really like the fact that they don't have to have an IT staff, purchase computing hardware and the like.  They can just treat this as a service that they pay for on a monthly basis.

Marvin likes to describe this as a utility computing model.  His customers understand this and like this idea.  This lets them quit trying to work with technology they don't really understand. They can just go to work.

What products did you consider before selecting something?

There are quite a few players in the virtualization technology market. It's really a very complex question that sounds simple. From the beginning we knew we were going to use Dell systems.

Why was this product selected over the others?

We looked at VMware, Citrix and a few others. We selected VMware even though it is considerably more expensive. We see it as more stable and reliable solution.

What tangible benefits has the organization received that can be directly attributed to the use of this technology?

Baker Business Systems has successfully deployed the Xsigo VP780 I/O Director in its data centers to virtualize the company’s server I/O infrastructure. By consolidating the network and storage connectivity to each server the company achieved a 66% reduction in server connections and a 30% reduction in capital expense. Other benefits included greater I/O performance and reduced latency which resulted in 30% faster response time for users.

The Xsigo I/O solution was chosen to complement the company’s selection of Dell 2950 servers, VMware ESX software, IQstore Networks iSCSI storage, and DataCore SAN Melody storage virtualization software. All elements are remotely manageable, allowing Baker to maintain its systems and modify server I/O configurations without visits to the data center.

The primary reason they selected this product was performance. The device makes it possible to have one connection per server and still have the systems see as many storage and network servers as necessary.

Marvin says Customer often tell us that this solution is up to 2 to 4 times faster than running everything on their own servers. Another benefit is that it is possible to manage the datacenter remotely.  The datacenter is 45 minutes away from the office.  It's possible for us to manage the datacenter without going there.

What advice would you offer others facing similar challenges?

Marvin would tell them to allow at least twice as long as they would first think. Many issues come up on this journey.  Marvin says "As you well know, virtualization touches everything and everything touches everything else."

In spite of their best efforts, it shouldn't be surprising if it is necessary to re-build the datacenter configuration several times until it works as needed. So, allow time for the IT administrators to learn in the implementation plan. Like all virtualization technology, it is very impressive, but very expensive so, it is necessary to get the budget in place before embarking on the journey.