ASI Solutions: still selling servers after decades in business

With ASI Solutions head of services Daniel Johns.

What server brands do you specialise in?

Our key vendor alliances are with Lenovo, HP and Dell in the server space. Being a managed services provider, we will always offer five or six service ‘accessories’ with any server quote. 

When did your company first get involved in this area?

ASI Solutions has been in business since 1986, and were OEM partners up until two years ago. We have been providing server-related services for as long as we have been building and selling servers.

What certifications do you have that apply to servers?

We hold server certifications with HP, Dell and Lenovo. We also ensure that we have enough certifications in sales and technical to qualify for higher-level partner status – either silver or gold level.

Which distributors do you use?

We have a strong working relationship with many key distributors, including Synnex, Ingram Micro and Dicker Data. Each distributor has its own value to add to specific opportunities.

Have you heard about any cool developments in the server space recently?

2016 was the year of hyperconverged server technology. Lenovo have the X6 series and the ThinkServer line, Dell have the FX range, and HPE have modified the Proliant range into an awesome hyperconverged appliance. The next step in the evolution, I believe, will be essentially ‘server-less computing’. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be a server involved – just not one in your own data centre.

Can you tell us about a recent deployment you have done?

A project with a construction company to refresh on-premises servers to support their distant offices. Using VMware across Lenovo servers and SANs, our solution provides a remote desktop environment across the entire company.

What is driving customers' server projects?

Aside from the traditional server refresh projects, we are seeing a lot of customer growth requiring their infrastructure to scale out in order to support an increasing number of staff and/or users. With the correct implementation right at the beginning, scaling can easily be achieved.

Servers are?

Thought of these days as either pets or cattle. The idea being that on-premises servers are pets – nurtured and loved – whereas cloud-hosted servers are the cattle: driven for mass production and not considered part of the family. But whether servers are on-premises, collocated or cloud-hosted virtual machines, they are equally as integral to the success (or failure) of your infrastructure strategy.