Nine servers, then one

At a glance

What was wrong

Dean Lewis had run on the same basic setup for years: firewalls past their useful life, consumer wireless, and more servers than the business had work for. Around sixteen hundred dollars a month went on servers nobody had re-examined since the day they were bought.

The support arrangement was one subcontractor. When he went to Italy and could not be reached, the company could not bill for about a week. Staff also had to reach the corporate office before they could open the applications they needed, which made working anywhere else a negotiation.

What we did

We went through every machine and every place data was being kept, and listed what the company was paying for against what it was using. Nine managed servers came down to one. The hardware had never been checked against what production actually needed, so that check happened too.

Rebuilding on services that fit the business removed the annual license fees that had been quietly renewing. Those savings paid for the new wireless equipment, so the project funded itself rather than arriving as a capital request.

What changed

Desktops became laptops, so people work where the work is. Nobody reaches back to the office to open an application any more, which is worth about fifteen minutes a day to each of them.

The other change was visibility. With the data reachable, the company can look at when product has actually arrived in the past instead of taking a supplier at their word, and quote lead times from that. The savings run to twenty-five to thirty thousand dollars a year.

In their words

Rick Lewis · President, Dean Lewis Associates

Tell us what you are running and what is going wrong with it. If we are not the right answer for a firm of your size, you will hear that on the call.

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