Testimonial: Stephen Lisk, Clinical Advisory Services Aotearoa Ltd (CASA)
Project: High Availability Virtualisation Project. CASA is also a current help@ifm client for ongoing PC and server support.
What kinds of IT systems do you require to run your business? We are a ‘virtual’ company that relies on the innovative use of high-availability technology to enable our team of clinicians to provide critical mental and psychological health services nationwide. We also need the ability to access applications and to communicate from our office, in a client’s office or on the road. This means an integrated data and communication solution.
Why did you choose IFM for your PC and network support? We were looking for an IT support organisation that offered breadth of technical skill and a high degree of competence in the implementation and maintenance of high-availability/virtualised servers and networking. The organisation also needed to be the right size for us, i.e., not so big that our needs didn’t disappear off the radar, as well as being professional and responsive in its service offering. We also wanted the organisation to be able to monitor and maintain our complete infrastructure including laptops nationwide, i.e. a Managed Service Provider. We found IFM through research and recommendation.
Prior to this project, were you experiencing downtime and outages? How did IFM solve this? Yes were experiencing some unacceptable downtime. While the virtualised, high-availability server clusters and SAN solution was our own concept, IFM helped us to turn it into a realisable design and implementation. Their networking expertise was very important in designing an integrated communications and data solution that not only met our operational needs but also our budget.
In addition to this project, did IFM make other suggestions that you implemented? Lots of small technical and practical solutions that added up have had a very positive impact on the how well the solution has worked and how much it cost.
What has been the result so far? The virtualised, clustered-server, high-availability solution has essentially removed any unplanned downtime of our business systems as well as substantially reducing planned downtime.