Introduction
With a passionate commitment to providing outstanding customer service and delivering high-quality products in a timely manner, KIB Electronics has set a high standard for helping its clients solve their most challenging problems efficiently and cost-effectively. Through intense collaboration, creative thinking and continuous innovation, KIB Electronics’ engineering team has completed over 4,000 projects featuring a variety of monitoring panels, lighting controls, switch plates and wire harnesses across a broad range of applications for more than 1,300 customers since its founding in 1975.
Challenge
KIB Electronics had developed an ad-hoc network with specialized equipment sourced from eBay, due largely to budgetary requirements. It decided to upgrade its IT environment after a large storm knocked out its production servers, which resulted in manufacturing and delivery delays. This event made the company realize that it needed a more reliable data center infrastructure to support its requirements for 24×7 uptime to meet its customer-centric goals. After researching possible solutions that would help it avoid future downtime, it decided that hyperconvergence would be the best.
“If we have a server down, we’re not building anything, we’re not shipping – we’re dead in the water and our business is going to suffer,” said Brian Milovich, IT Consultant at KIB Electronics. “Serving our customers is not possible if we do not have the right computing infrastructure in place. We were looking at doing the infrastructure upgrade from a financial aspect – what would make sense given our growth from an IT standpoint? I came across some articles on hyperconvergence and it sounded like a great idea.”
KIB Electronics looked at hyperconverged solutions from HP and Dell but felt that their attitude was poor and their customer service was lacking. Milovich said he spoke to seven different people at Dell on seven different occasions and got a different answer every time. He felt that KIB Electronics was too small in scale for these vendors. A colleague at GHA Technologies recommended that Milovich look at Scale Computing and its hyperconverged platform.
After checking references from other customers in the Indiana area, Milovich decided to implement Scale Computing Platform for its affordability and functionality.
Solution
Scale Computing Platform brings storage, servers, virtualization, and management together in a single, comprehensive system. With no virtualization software to license and no external storage to buy, Scale Computing products lower out-of-pocket costs and radically simplify the infrastructure needed to keep applications running. SC//Platform makes the deployment and management of a highly available and scalable infrastructure as easy to manage as a single server.
The installation process was seamless and only took a few hours to get the system up and running. KIB Electronics currently has 12 servers running on the system, hosting a variety of business-critical applications, including ERP, HealthCore and an SQL database, in addition to a VDI testing environment. With no hardware limitations, KIB Electronics has the ability to scale as its business grows, with Scale Computing providing additional nodes when needed. KIB Electronics has future plans including expanding to offsite disaster recovery, and using the replication functionality of Scale Computing HyperCore for additional protection.
“I love the simplicity, the functionality and the convenience – not to mention its impeccable architecture,” said Milovich. “The [SC//HyperCore] snapshot functionality provides a great environment for troubleshooting and for infrastructure. I can actually go home and not worry about a physical box dying while I’m away from work. That takes a load of stress off my shoulders. Ultimately, Scale Computing gave me my weekends back, as well as peace of mind.”
In addition to gaining the benefits of simplicity, availability, and scalability that KIB Electronics required, Milovich also appreciated Scale Computing’s customer-centric approach. Unlike his experience dealing with Dell and HP, he said that he likes interacting with the people at Scale Computing and feels he has a personal relationship with them. Milovich said he always gets a response to any emails sent and that Scale Computing “always goes the extra mile” in providing the assistance that he needs. This combination of product reliability and personalized support is what makes him not hesitate to recommend SC//Platform to other mid-market enterprises.