* Software service provider turns to blades, remote management software
Jeff Almoney, CTO of Reynolds & Reynolds in Dayton, Ohio, wanted to manage and provision the servers the company uses for running retail software – without ever having to visit them to do it.
He and Byron Propst, director of strategy for a company that provides sales, service and warranty program management software to 40% of the nation’s auto dealers, put in IBM xSeries BladeCenter servers and installed IBM Tivoli Storage Manager and IBM Director software.
“The thing we are after is scalability of the support model, so we wanted a system that offers complete remote control,” Almoney says. “The only time we visit the facility is to add infrastructure, so the blades allow us to install once, configure many times. It’s the ‘lights out’ mantra of support.”
The blade servers are located in a data center remote from Reynolds & Reynolds’ offices. With IBM Director and Tivoli Provisioning Manager, Almoney and Propst can install operating systems, applications and patches on the Intel Xeon-based blades without ever seeing the inside of the data center.
Reynolds & Reynolds has 40 IBM BladeCenter servers and hopes to expand that to 200 by year-end. The servers are attached via Fibre Channel to an IBM TotalStorage DS4500 storage-area network (SAN) with a capacity of 5.7T bytes.
This SAN runs the software that Reynolds & Reynolds supplies to its customers as a service. Few car dealerships have IT professionals available to manage a network, much less a SAN, so Reynolds & Reynolds supplies the service for them. Users can access software, whether it be parts databases or warranty information, from a Web browser.
The servers in Almoney’s implementation can be configured from the SAN if necessary. If a server fails, it boots from an image on the SAN, and the applications and operating system are copied to it.
“We keep spare blades in each chassis, so if there were some kind of hardware failure we’d be able to switch to another blade.” Almoney says.
When trouble occurs, each BladeCenter can call home automatically to IBM to notify IBM of the problem. IBM can then contact the customer, and the customer can initiate repairs.
Reynolds & Reynolds installed its first blades last August.
“With our system, customers don’t have to be IT experts. They can sell cars,” Almoney says.
