Tools4Ever's UMRA is a must-have

Name: TOM FRANCIOSI
Title: CIO
Company: Covenant Dove, a national nursing home provider
Location: Memphis, Tenn.

Favorite data center product: Tools4Ever's User Management Resource Administrator (UMRA) 

UMRA is hands down my favorite tool. It's a graphical scripting engine that lets you do pretty near anything you can think of. Right now we're primarily using it to set up new user accounts. Whenever we create a new position, the process of setting up that account shoots an e-mail notification that a position was added, what the exact title is, at what location and the person's name. At my last job, it could take three or four days to get a new account set up. Here, we can get you set up in four hours or less.

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Name: TOM FRANCIOSI
Title: CIO
Company: Covenant Dove, a national nursing home provider
Location: Memphis, Tenn.

Favorite data center product: Tools4Ever's User Management Resource Administrator (UMRA) 

UMRA is hands down my favorite tool. It's a graphical scripting engine that lets you do pretty near anything you can think of. Right now we're primarily using it to set up new user accounts. Whenever we create a new position, the process of setting up that account shoots an e-mail notification that a position was added, what the exact title is, at what location and the person's name. At my last job, it could take three or four days to get a new account set up. Here, we can get you set up in four hours or less.

Once, I was out of town on a business trip and we were in the midst of migrating to a new storage network, when the old SAN went down. The engineer responsible for that project finally got it back online, and now it's 8:30 at night. He calls me and says, 'OK, it's back online. Do you want me to let users get back on to it?' I'm like, 'Heck no. Keep them out!' Since users had been out for eight hours already, I knew nobody would complain if we were out the rest of the night, so I said, 'That's it, we're ripping this Band-Aid off and I'm going to move everything.'

And in about 15 minutes, I wrote and tested a mass project with UMRA to migrate all of the storage from the old to the new network. The project not only moved the storage, it fixed problems that we had with inconsistent NTFS permissions and made them uniform on all of the home directories, profile folders and shared network drives. We let it run all night long and the next morning we were running on the new SAN.

I could not live without this tool. I'd need another person or two on my staff -- or we'd put up a lot with a lot of problems that we don't nowadays.

Next product: Automated server recovery; virtual tape library

We're looking at a number of products that would automate updates to our recovery environment so we could, for example, maintain virtual replicas of production servers at separate geographic locations. We've been trying to do this manually, but it's just too much work. I think we'll need a blended approach, with VMware Site Recovery Manager closing part of the gap and Vizioncore or Double-Take for the physical-to-virtual replicas.

Dream Tool: Automated classification of unstructured documents

What I want is a system that can flip through my documents and put them into classifications, such as clinical or financial or construction data so that when I'm implementing or automating a document-retention policy, it can figure out what is clinical data, for example, and if we have a policy to retain these for six-years then purge, a system would automatically do that for me.

Pleasant surprises: VMware vSphere and Teneros' Always-On

I actually had low expectations for VMware. I didn't really see that we'd have a strong need for it or that it'd become a critical system for us. But I have to say I'm extremely impressed with how well it behaves and how easy it is to administer – and without it, we would've had to buy a whole lot more servers.