I find it enlightening to speak with representatives of companies actually using a supplier's products. These conversations often a better shine a light on product capabilities. This time, I had the opportunity to communicate with Deepan Acharya at One Call Medical, Inc. (OCM), a user of Egenera's PAN Manager.
Please introduce yourself and your organization?
My name is Deepan Acharya. I'm a Senior Infrastructure Solutions Lead at One Call Medical, Inc. It's my job to Research emerging technologies, evaluate, and recommend products and solutions that align with enterprise infrastructure projects covering servers, security, storage, virtualization and infrastructure automation etc.
One Call Medical, Inc. (OCM) is the nation's trusted partner, delivering a suite of easy-to-use, efficient and cost-effective specialty services that help claim professionals achieve superior outcomes. We provide the experience and reliability that optimizes each claim, setting the standard in innovation, customer service, and dependability.
What are you doing that needed this type of technology?
As One Call Medical Inc continues to grow quickly it wanted something that would help manage its IT infrastructure need's efficiently and intelligently. Below is a list of some of the key requirements and features that we looked for in the products offered by vendors like Egenera:
- A platform that would grow and scale well with One Call Medical Inc's growing business demands.
- An open platform that also scales and adapts to new emerging technologies without significant IT re-investment's or platform overhaul.
- A product platform that would offer higher availability and redundancy integration at most layers of the IT infrastructure stack and One Call Medical's own IT infrastructure architecture.
- A product platform that offers ability to perform maintenance with almost minimum to zero disruption to IT business services.
- A product platform that offers and helps ensure logical and physical security built into the platform design.
- A platform which offers cost effective efficient resources utilization.
- A platform that offers some form of self monitoring and alerting capabilities built into the platform as well as integrates into existing monitoring and automation solutions.
- A product platform that while helping the organization to grow will also help reduce its data center CO2 and physical server and networking cable's footprint sprawl in the long term via efficient and scalable consolidation via vendor agnostic virtualization.
- In this age and times of operating smartly with lean budgets and team, a mature product that offered shorter learning curve for day to day IT operations and administration and hence, help achieve operational efficiencies and productivity gains.
- A competitively priced product platform with quality support that offered lower TCO and better ROI in the long run.
What products did you consider before making a selection?
We researched several well known and established large vendors including from Fortune 500 vendors which claim to provide similar solutions.
Why did you select this product?
After researching and evaluating products from several vendors, found Egenera's product offerings to be the solution which offered most of the above items outlined above in question # 2, including in some cases features ahead of the technology curve when compared to several of to its peers in the converged infrastructure space.
Egenera offered a one stop solution for sales and support.
We've gotten excellent customer friendly and knowledgeable after sales support each and every time we've called. This re-confirmed our belief that we had made the correcdt decision. At this point, we have faith in the product and the company.
What tangible benefit have you gotten through the use of this product?
We've received a number of benefits through the use of Egenera's PAN Manager including:
- Higher business SLA's.
- Higher availability of the IT infrastructure resources on the whole and hence the business processes that scales and adapts with the needs.
- Better turnaround times in terms of IT and IT infrastructure service delivery productivity gains.
- We have been able to significantly consolidate our physical servers’ footprint to virtual servers without loss of performance, availability and SLA using Egenera's native hypervisor solution and other hypervisor solutions available in the market.
- Efficient use of server, networking, and storage resources with minimum administrative management overhead by leveraging and redeploying resources via resource pools.
What advice would you offer others facing similar circumstances?
It is very important to note and understand that one solution does not fit all. Each organization's priorities and requirements will be unique, however there will always be some items and needs common across the entities.
It is very important to understand your existing pain points, cost overheads overall organization and specific IT strategy. Also it is very important that the proper homework is done to understand the internal needs of the business.
For example, it is very important to understand service levels are needed for each application. This means knowing the performance, availability, security, and scalability requirements.
The next step is aligning the requirements with the right open platform and design. If this is done properly, the platform will be able to address both short term and long term needs
Furthermore, it is very important to understand the long term strategy and product pipeline of the vendor before making the choice of the platform.