Case Study: Sage Dental Readies Its IT Infrastructure for Growth
… outfit the organization with new Dell desktops, and R2 added that to its to-do list.
“We’d start in the morning, replace each workstation, get the employee up to speed, and work on the network during the lunch hour. Delivering the images and desktops wasn’t a specialty of ours; it wasn’t something we had done before, but as a true partner, it didn’t make sense for Dan to have to send out someone else when we were in the field, so we took on the bulk of the hardware swap,” he said.
R2 calculated at one point about 21 out of about 29 employees had touched the project in some capacity – support, procurement, project management, ordering – and at least 10 different engineers took a role in delivery.
While that was going on, there were issues at the data center. R2 ripped and replaced 13 Dell servers and implemented a Cisco UCS enclosure, which replaced a VMware environment. Prior to the new solution, Sage used Dell and VMware vSphere Standard. R2 deployed Cisco UCS and VMware vSphere Enterprise for more visibility and capability in the data center.
“We were very flexible about helping to solve any onsite challenge [Sage] was having whether within the scope of the project or outside of it,” said Jason Doherty, director of sales at R2. “We have people that are capable of making good decisions on hand, as needed.”
The dental facilities are in a single-story building and required about two or three access points in each location. R2 put in a network capacity to deliver speeds of over 300Mbps at each location with security.
“We were building for the future, not only data but voice and video, for the purpose of training and real-time communication,” said Jamie Doherty.
R2 also implemented Cisco Umbrella for OpenDNS enterprise security and Cisco AMP for Endpoints. Old Polycom technology was replaced with Cisco WebEx Room Kits in all executive offices and conference rooms, transforming how the company collaborates.
2020 is the year that Sage stabilizes and runs the company at scale, having done multiple infrastructure projects last year, according to Mirsky. He continues to build out his IT team, including a service desk, an engineering team, a BI team and an application development team.
“R2 will be my first call for other projects and they stay actively engaged with us. I have a retainer with them that I use for engineering work,” he added. “They genuinely care. I would have never done all these big projects and risked my job and reputation unless I was sure that they could execute flawlessly.”
Mirsky considers the outcome and scope of the IT projects that R2 undertook, with a relatively small team, to be unheard of.
“The transformation that we had going from that much downtime to zero downtime is incredible,” he said.
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