Simplify IT – A Customer Perspective

At Dell, we talk a lot about how to simplify IT. But the most powerful voices come from customers. Merlin Glynn, CTO of MedNetwoRx in Dallas, Texas, was kind enough to write this email and allow us to publish it here. Thank you for writing Merlin.

_______

I am the CTO of a small to medium-sized ASP where our annual budgets are very tight.  Perhaps in our IT market place more than any other, we attempt to stretch our buying potential to its utmost.  We have recently undertaken a 12 month DataCenter refresh project where we have upgraded/implemented over 160 physical and virtual servers along with associated DELL-EMC storage, OpenManage IT systems management, and other DataCenter Infrastructure objects.  I wanted to take this time to commend the Dell Enterprise Technology Center for the documentation, case studies, and technical sales material they produce.  In particular Scott Hanson’s many projects related to PowerEdge Servers and VMware have been of extreme benefit to us in choosing DELL as our preferred hardware vendor.  Documents such as Competitive Power Savings with VMware Consolidation on the Dell PowerEdge 2950 gave us template data to plan power consumption and capacity analysis of the large virtualization component of our data center refresh.  In the past 12 months we have consolidated 100+ various x86 platform servers onto 26 Dell Poweredge 2950s.  Recent studies with VMware DRS and VMotion capabilities on Dell servers, provided by Mr. Hanson and the Dell Enterprise Technology Center, have also greatly assisted us in planning for our current VMware Disaster Recovery implementation.  The output of this group is the main reason we continue to deploy DELL servers in our environment today.  We know we can trust the real world data provided in these projects to make decisions that will maximize our deployment dollar.

Mednetworx focuses on providing (EHR) Electronic Health Records and (PM) Practice Management software to our customer base via a secure ASP application presentation scenario.  In addition to our DataCenter Refresh project, our company has also gone from acquisition to production with an implementation of an Allscripts TouchWorks PM and EHR solution for the New Mexico Department of Health.  New Mexico has 33 counties and the state's total area is 121,665 square miles.  At a population density of 15 per square mile, New Mexico is the sixth most sparsely inhabited U.S. State.  THIS IMPLEMENTATION EFFORT SPANNED 55 LOCATIONS IN ONLY 12 MONTHS, and was implemented on DELL Poweredge 2950 servers, DELL-EMC CX storage along with Cisco, Citrix, and VMware products.  We could not have performed this implementation without the rapid purchase cycle of DELL distribution and ‘up-front’ knowledge of the server capabilities in our planned environment, which we gleaned from material produced by the Dell Enterprise Technology Center.  So from one of your ‘smaller’ customers, I say thanks for the job these guys and DELL as a whole have done for our SMB business model.

About the Author: David Graves