Acryness Selects eGroup’s eCloud to Gain a Competitive Advantage

eCloud’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provides Acryness the latest in system and server infrastructure solutions

Mount Pleasant, SC (PRWEB) May 21, 2013 – eGroup, the Southeast’s leading provider of cloud, application and end-user computing services, today announced that Acryness, a document solutions company based in Mooresville, NC, has migrated its mission-critical systems and servers into the eCloud.

As a result, Acryness anticipates improvement in its competitive advantage through operational and efficiency savings. Working closely with eGroup engineers, Acryness quickly consolidated its FTP, Web, and Database servers along with its internal data processing systems into the eCloud.

Chris Jarjoura, IT Director, Acryness, said: “We were looking to upgrade our server environment as some of our systems were already in a cloud infrastructure. We took this opportunity to consolidate more of our infrastructure to a reputable cloud environment. We had an existing relationship with eGroup, but after looking at the market cloud providers, we selected eGroup’s eCloud as it offered the best set of functionality and reliability at a competitive price.”

“Acryness is a great example of a forward-thinking firm that truly believes by harnessing cloud computing it can not only improve customer delivery and service, but cut costs and reduce internal inefficiencies as well,” said Steve Rattacasa, Cloud Services Manager, eGroup. “In such a competitive market, Acryness turned to the eCloud so that it could focus on customers, solutions delivery and overall growth, not upgrading and maintaining technology.”

The eGroup eCloud is a hosted, high-performance computing infrastructure, purpose-built to efficiently maintain, protect, and deliver IT securely to businesses of all sizes. In the eCloud, customers enjoy easy and secure access to their mission-critical applications and data anytime, anywhere, on any device.

Mount Pleasant, SC (PRWEB) May 16, 2013 – eGroup, the Southeast’s leading provider of cloud, application, and end-user computing services, today announced it has received the 2012 EMC® Velocity™ Services Quality Award from EMC Corporation for achieving outstanding service excellence and customer satisfaction as measured by the EMC Velocity Services Quality (VSQ) program.

This marks the third time eGroup has won the exclusive award.

The EMC VSQ program is a project-specific survey program designed for partners with Velocity Services designations to solicit customer feedback regarding the quality of the partner’s service engagements.

“We’re thrilled that our mission to be a trusted advisor, focused solely on positive project outcomes, is once again recognized by EMC and our customers,” said Mike Carter, Principal, eGroup. “eGroup’s project delivery team is continually laser focused on saving the customer time, money and enabling a competitive advantage. Receiving the Velocity Services Quality Award is an endorsement that our smooth project experience process is successful and delivering the highest level of customer satisfaction.”

“EMC’s Total Customer Experience hinges on superior customer satisfaction and quality and is a cornerstone of EMC’s success. I’m delighted to see an increasing number of Velocity Solution Provider partners from around the world who continue to drive and deliver outstanding levels of customer service to their customers. The latest survey results demonstrate that these partners have embraced and honed their EMC services skills set to maintain increasingly high levels of customer satisfaction,” said Jeff Schmitt, Americas Theatre Lead, Global Services Partners, EMC Corporation. “As an EMC Velocity Services Quality Award winner, eGroup demonstrates leadership in service delivery quality and exemplifies the high standards to which EMC holds its own Global Services organization.”

The EMC Velocity Services program enables a select community of trained and certified EMC authorized partners to deliver a comprehensive portfolio of services ranging from technology implementation to technical support. These partners provide value-added services to address the most crucial aspects of a customer’s information technology infrastructure.

You already read about how we helped Beaufort Memorial Hospital with its disaster recovery strategy.

Here are a few more recent articles in which eGroup provided insight:

Computer Reseller News: Is Software-Defined Storage For Real Or A Lot Of Hot Air?

Mike Carter, eGroup’s Principal, provided an email response to reporter, Joe Kovar, on his analysis of the SD storage market

Computer Reseller News: Software-Defined Data Centers: Should You Jump On The Bandwagon?

Rich Young, eGroup’s Marketing & Communications Manager, spoke with Joe Kovar about the marketing term, “software-defined” and its effectiveness, or lack thereof.

Computer Reseller News: EMC’s New Partner Program Motto: ‘More Simple, Predictable, Profitable’

Young applauds EMC’s announcement about the new Business partner program while at EMC World 2013.

SearchITchannel.com: Channel Recruitment and VAR Staffing Best Practices

Young offers commentary around eGroup’s recruitment challenge.

Back-Up Insurance

It never hurts to be prepared for the worst-case scenario. For smaller hospitals that rely on a single data center, backing up data so they can be recovered may not be enough if the data center is down for any length of time. Leaders at Beaufort Memorial Hospital in Beaufort, S.C., took that into account when developing a disaster recovery plan, says Ed Ricks, CIO.

A 197-bed community hospital that serves over 100,000 people, Beaufort Memorial is located near the Atlantic coast, making it vulnerable to hurricanes and floods. And while Ricks says his disaster recovery plan has “morphed over the years,” he emphasizes that in addition to its in-house data center, the hospital also rents space in a building further inland that serves as a “warm” site.

In the past, as real-time data was replicated, the data were sent to the warm site where it was stored. But because that warm site was not an active site, it lacked the ability to run any of the hospital’s information systems.

However, since the hospital had already approved another medical arts building on the campus, Ricks says the decision was made to put a second data center in the new building. “That’s now our secondary data center but it will soon become our primary center,” he explains. “We want it to be an active-active data center.”

Ricks says the hospital partnered with Mt. Pleasant, S.C.-based eGroup to design a plan that would incorporate two data centers instead of one. In addition, Beaufort Memorial had already set up its backup storage solutions with the Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC Corp., so EMC was brought back to work on the expansion project.

Now, says Ricks, the two data centers are linked with a fiber optic cable owned by the hospital with a current capacity of 10 gigabytes per second. The warm site also is connected, but by a leased line that is part of the backbone for the state’s health information exchange (HIE), he says.

Ultimately, Ricks says, he would like to turn the warm site hot in case both on-site data centers ever go down. “The long view is to turn the warm site into another active data center — probably in a few years.”

In backing up data to disk, one copy is now stored in the secondary data center while a second copy is stored at the warm site, he says.

Working with eGroup was fortuitous for Beaufort Memorial, since that applications and services provider has strategic partnerships with EMC, Cisco Systems, and the Palo Alto, Calif.-based VMware.

Beaufort Memorial continues to add new technologies to its arsenal: not only does it no longer use paper charts, but it also added a virtualization platform using VMware’s vSphere, Ricks says. “We run 225 servers and about 95 percent are virtual.”

Developing a disaster recovery strategy and building in redundancy with a second data center was not without its challenges. “You can do anything you want to do with enough time and money. But you’re always looking at competing dollars,” he says, noting that IT expenditures are often at odds with those on the clinical side.

As for offering advice to other CIOs who are planning to implement a disaster recovery strategy, Ricks urges, “Have a long-term plan but make sure you have an end point in mind. Communicate what you want to do, get everything in place, then test it.”

Plus, he notes, “It’s not a luxury; it’s a necessity.”

eGroup’s SharePoint expert, Brad Shannon, was recently quoted in SearchContentManagement’s article covering SharePoint upgrades, “SharePoint upgrade requires sharp focus on planning, user preparation.” His advice on how to better prepare for an upgrade is pasted below.

Give the entire piece a read and then start documenting your infrastructure!

A company’s technology infrastructure also needs to be prepared for upgrading to a new version of SharePoint, and as part of that process, it’s important to document the existing features and services in a SharePoint environment as well as the new ones that will be deployed in the upgrade, said Brad Shannon, an application services engineer at eGroup, a technology consultancy in Mount Pleasant, S.C.

“If you don’t know what you have in your environment, you’re going to find out the hard way,” Shannon said, explaining that the more detailed the documentation of the current environment is, the better an organization can prepare for the SharePoint upgrade.

Companies should also start with a clean SharePoint farm, Shannon advised. “That means you don’t have anything on the farm you don’t need,” he said. Sometimes SharePoint systems will include items used for testing purposes that were never fully deployed or removed. Leaving them in place can create more work for SharePoint administrators, Shannon said.