A remote resolution

Australian businesses are increasingly looking to expand across the country and an IT infrastructure is essential to this aim, but how you manage your IT requirements in disperse locations is a vital element.

That is where resellers such as Queensland-based Dennis’ Computers are called in as specialists in the field of providing and supporting servers, storage and workstations for networks of differing sizes. The firm also builds offerings for other IT firms, and is a partner of both processor giant Intel and virtualisation firm VMware.

Dennis’ Computers has an ongoing relationship with fellow Queensland-based Tropic Distributors, a fuel firm which has been operating for more than 40 years. Tropic is a Caltex fuel distributor engaged in wholesale and retail sales alongside the distribution of bulk fuels and lubricants. The firm’s retail division encompasses 11 sites including nine service stations located in Tully, Ingham, three in Townsville, Charters Towers, Ayr, Bowen and Winton and two unmanned sites at Roseneath and Rossiters Hill.

“Tropic is a big company and had a nightmare managing its PCs which are located all over the place,” said Dennis Evans, owner and president of Dennis’ Computers. “We have implemented SyAM Software – which is a third-party software certified for Intel – for Tropic Distributors.”

Dennis is the Australian distributor for US-based SyAM Software which manages instances of unanticipated downtime or issues. SyAM Software develops products that aim to help SMBs and enterprises manage their multi-vendor computer assets more effectively, prolonging their life and decreasing total cost of ownership. Its products are offered in either System Client or System Area Manager configurations and work across all brands of computer systems. SyAM Software System Area Manager is its flagship product for system management. It is a single tool to manage multiple servers, PCI RAID storage systems, desktops and notebooks within the IT environment.

“What’s key for my clients is catching issues before they became problems, being proactive, rather than reactive,” said Evans. “For example, for one of my client’s sites I got an urgent email from a device installed with [SyAM Software’s] System Area Manager. I got on the phone with the client and told them their hard drive was about to fail. Sure enough, during our conversation the hard drive did just that.”
Evans said in relation to that site the firm had only a single IT technician on staff. “While the technician supports the desktops, I manage all the integration and backend system support. For most clients that’s a value-add they find especially helpful,” he said.

SyAM Software’s systems level monitoring tracks fan speeds, temperature, voltage power redundancy, single-bit and multi-bit memory module errors, network connectivity and physical intrusions. This allows administrations to know if users are adding applications or hardware devices that may be causing issues.

“I will get a call from a client who can’t do a task. With SyAM being integrated into their system, I can open up a VPN path, accessing their machines remotely from my site and get straight on to their desktops and show them how to do something,” said Evans. “It’s a very streamlined process. One of my newest clients is a petrol station chain, which has locations that vary from as far as 400 kilometres south of my site to nearly 400 kilometres north.

“To support server and system uptime they use multiple private networks that converge in a central hub. With SyAM incorporated they can now manage their entire network without having to train employees on software over the network, saving them desktop visits. SyAM is not only a problem solver, it is a time-saver,” he said.

Citing another of Dennis’ clients, Evans explained that a firm with 35 sites and five servers did not have enough hard drive space or RAID. “They were constantly at 95 percent capacity,” he said. “Using SyAM, I recommended adding more RAM into the systems and optimising their RAID configuration. Their performance as well as capacity increased accordingly.”

Dennis also uses SyAM to contribute to the Green IT issue which is sweeping the industry. SyAM’s Power Management offering allows administrators to shut down servers and PCs when they are not seen, creating both an energy and money savings. SyAM claimed that the average workday is about 10 hours, or 50 hours a week. A week, however, has 168 hours. This means that even in power-save modes, systems are drawing energy for about 118 hours where no one is using them. This equates to 6136 hours for one machine in one year.

SyAM Software has developed a Power Management offering that could cut energy costs by as much as 40 percent or more. Its products allow administrators to create power policies and enforce them without any intervention by end-users.

“PCs are sometimes left on for maintenance updates as well as monitoring their availability,” said Evans. “When that’s complete and the administrators leave they can now turn their PCs off. They can also, through SyAM, schedule them to turn back on.”

Dennis claimed that it not only benefits from monitoring client systems remotely, but also being able to market SyAM directly to those clients who prefer to monitor their systems themselves.

“For doctors’ offices, for example, which typically do not have a full-time technician on staff, remote monitoring and management is cost-effective. The petrol stations, on the other hand use SyAM to monitor themselves, in a large part because they have the manpower on staff.”

Recently, Dennis has been using SyAM alongside Intel vPro Technology which furthers the remote management capabilities. “We’re now starting to remotely ‘push out’ images, especially out to the petrol stations, rather than driving them out to the individual sites. That way, once they traverse the private network the images are received and captured locally, accelerating, among other benefits, remote resolution,” said Evans.

“To be competitive as a system provider requires the ability to do more for clients than simple break/fix. Having SyAM System Area Manager be a part of the services I can offer clients – complete with its end-to-end visibility for their servers, systems, and PCs – ensures their peace of mind as well as my own success.”

Dennis’ offering to Tropic does not stop at the work it done with SyAM Software. “We have also virtulisated Tropic. It had nine servers, that has been consolidated to two now. We also give back-up support when Tropic is out of its depth,” added Evans.

Zac Burrell, IT manager at Tropic, said: “The virtualisation part is a very good project that we are working with Dennis on right now. We have got two servers and one SAN, and we plan to implement another SAN in soon.

“If we have something crash, using VMware we can have a virtual server ready to migrate to, so our clients won’t see that we have been hit at all. The same applies once we have our second SAN.”

Commenting on the SyAM Software implementation, Burrell said Tropic was looking for remote management which the firm could control from a centralised location.

“We wanted to provide training, monitor new applications and updates, see if we needed new software versions and wanted a suite that could remotely manage all of that,” he said. “Dennis [Evans] does a lot of our hardware and he suggested using SyAM. We trialled it and found that it worked well for us.”

Burrell said Tropic covers a huge area of Queensland and needed a solution which reduced the amount of time spent travelling around the region.

“Dennis has proven itself as a service provider and their experience is invaluable to us. Dennis [Evans] has the login details to a terminal server and he can look at the SyAM software and assist with any issues with our hardware.”

Moving forward, Burrell said Tropic is looking to set up a disaster recovery (DR) site and to establish another server and SAN at Telstra’s DR site. “This will enable us extend our VMware usage to the DR site, then our server data will be at the DR site in the event of a disaster,” added Burrell.