VAR's Cold Call Results In $450,000 SAN Project
VAR AccessFlow, Inc. secures a multiphase project to virtualize over 200 servers for a large hospital.
If you talk to your salespeople, chances are cold calling is not their favorite thing to do. It takes a lot of time, stamina, and persistence to generate sales this way. Yet, sometimes it is the only way to make inroads with targeted companies. One of AccessFlow's sales representatives, Brian Jang, used this approach to develop a long-term relationship with a hospital to replace 200 servers with a virtual SAN (storage area network).
Jang began the process by cold calling the hospital's vice president in charge of storage and infrastructure. The vice president directed Jang to the appropriate manager on his team. Jang leveraged this referral to set up the meeting with the manager. During the sales process, AccessFlow emphasized the affordability and scalability of the SAN. There was also an educational process on how the SAN works with a virtual environment. "We won the business because we were able to offer a comprehensive solution that included the SAN, virtualization, and disaster recovery," explains Steve Kaplan, CEO of AccessFlow. It took eight months from the initial contact until the purchase order was issued in July 2007.
When AccessFlow made its initial contact, the hospital was facing several problems in its data center. Because it had been adding on servers as needed, the hospital was managing a conglomeration of HP servers, various EMC and HP storage equipment, and different Cisco switches and routers. The disaster recovery system the manager had in place was simply backing up over 200 servers to tape and storing the data off-site. Due to the server sprawl, the hospital was running out of room in the data center and considering adding on to its data center or relocating to a larger space.
Include Disaster Recovery In Your SAN Solution
AccessFlow proposed a phased approach to transition from a physical environment to a virtual environment. The solution the VAR introduced included all aspects of an infrastructure environment: servers, storage, backup, networks, and disaster recovery.
The first phase of the project involved piloting the virtual SAN for 20 servers. AccessFlow installed a Pillar Data Systems Axiom 500 for the SAN with DataCore VMware to virtualize the SAN for tertiary storage and disaster recovery replication. ESX servers deliver the server resources for the Pillar SAN. This phase accounted for $170,000 of the total project and lasted six weeks. During that time, the VAR rearranged the data center to locate the virtualized servers near the racks and equipment they were installing. Once all the equipment was installed, the pilot lasted six months.
During the project, AccessFlow encountered some challenges while working with the hospital team. The VAR had to create space in the hospital's data center for the new hardware that virtualized the servers. "Our client was short-staffed to begin with, so it took longer to deploy the pilot," states Kaplan. "We worked closely with the client to schedule the equipment moves and installation to ensure we didn't overload their staff."
AccessFlow's greatest challenge during the project was educating the hospital's data center team on how to use and manage a virtual environment. "Their biggest concern was that we would crash their network. Through the pilot, we taught them how to work with a virtual SAN," continues Kaplan. As the VAR mentored the client during the pilot, the hospital team became more comfortable with the virtual environment.
Phase two of the project, which accounted for $280,000, involved virtualizing 50 more servers and moving the Pillar SAN into production. "Because we already had the SAN built and running for the pilot, the transition into production was uneventful," says Kaplan. AccessFlow completed the second phase of the project in four weeks, releasing the SAN to production in January 2008.
In the last two phases of the project, AccessFlow will virtualize the remaining 114 servers in the hospital's data center and implement a disaster recovery system through replication. The client allocated $280,000 per year to complete the entire conversion and maintain the new SAN.
As a result of the first two phases of the project, the hospital is no longer looking to expand its data center. Instead, it has gained floor space. It also has begun realizing productivity gains by managing similar hardware. As for AccessFlow, its initial cold call will generate more than $1 million worth of business.