May 3, 2019 KIB Electronics Upgrades IT with Scale Computing

May 2, 2019

Introduction

With a passionate commitment to providing outstanding customer service and delivering high-quality products in a timely manner, KIB Electronics has set a high standard for helping its clients solve their most challenging problems efficiently and cost-effectively. Through intense collaboration, creative thinking and continuous innovation, KIB Electronics’ engineering team has completed over 4,000 projects featuring a variety of monitoring panels, lighting controls, switch plates and wire harnesses across a broad range of applications for more than 1,300 customers since its founding in 1975.

Challenge

Having previously developed an ad-hoc network with specialized equipment sourced from eBay, due in large part to budgetary requirements, KIB Electronics decided to upgrade its IT environment after a large storm knocked out its production servers, which resulted in manufacturing and delivery delays. This event made the company realize that it needed to have a more reliable data center infrastructure in place to support its requirements for 24×7 uptime in order to meet its customer-centric goals. After researching possible solutions that would help it avoid future downtime, it was decided that hyperconvergence would be the best way to go.

“If we have a server down, we’re not building anything, we’re not shipping – we’re dead in the water and our business is going to suffer,” said Brian Milovich, IT Consultant at KIB Electronics. “Serving our customers is not possible if we do not have the right computing infrastructure in place. We were looking at doing the infrastructure upgrade from a financial aspect – what would make sense given our growth from an IT standpoint? I came across some articles on hyperconvergence and it sounded like a great idea.”

KIB Electronics looked at hyperconverged solutions from HP and Dell but felt that their attitude was poor and their customer service was lacking. Milovich said that he spoke to seven different people at Dell on seven different occasions and got a different answer every time. He got the feeling that KIB Electronics was too small in scale for these vendors. A colleague at GHA Technologies recommended that Milovich look at Scale Computing and its HC3 hyperconverged platform. After checking references from other customers in the Indiana area, Milovich made the decision to implement the Scale solution for its affordability and functionality.

Solution

Scale Computing’s HC3 platform brings storage, servers, virtualization and management together in a single, comprehensive system. With no virtualization software to license and no external storage to buy, HC3 products lower out-of-pocket costs and radically simplify the infrastructure needed to keep applications running. HC3 products make the deployment and management of a highly available and scalable infrastructure as easy to manage as a single server.

The installation process was seamless and only took a few hours to get the HC3 system up and running. KIB Electronics currently has 12 servers running on the system, hosting a variety of business-critical applications, including ERP, HealthCore and an SQL database, in addition to a VDI testing environment. With no hardware limitations, KIB Electronics has the ability to scale as its business grows, with Scale Computing able to provide additional nodes when needed. Future plans for the HC3 include expanding to offsite disaster recovery, making use of the replication functionality of Scale Computing’s HyperCore software, for additional protection.

“I love the simplicity, the functionality and the convenience – not to mention its impeccable architecture,” said Milovich. “The HC3 snapshot functionality provides a great environment for troubleshooting and for infrastructure. I can actually go home and not worry about a physical box dying while I’m away from work. That takes a load of stress off my shoulders. Ultimately, Scale Computing gave me my weekends back, as well as peace of mind.”

In addition to gaining the benefits of simplicity, availability and scalability that KIB Electronics required, Milovich also appreciated Scale Computing’s customer-centric approach. Unlike his experience dealing with Dell and HP, he said that he likes interacting with the people at Scale Computing and feels he has a personal relationship with them. Milovich said he always gets a response to any emails sent and that Scale Computing “always goes the extra mile” in providing the assistance that he needs. This combination of product reliability and personalized support is what makes him not hesitate to recommend the HC3 platform to other midmarket enterprises.

Subscribe to Industry Today