Transcript
scale computing. My name is Ramon Vasquez, and I'm the CTO for Grupo Colón Jerena in Puerto Rico. We manage franchise restaurants for different brands. We have Wendy's, Applebee's, Longhorn, Olive Garden, and Scissors Steakhouse. And on top of that, we have like nine real estate companies, we have a construction company, and we also have a warehouse where we distribute to our restaurants. Our biggest challenge was trying to modernize our data center with virtualization. Since we were going to be implementing newer apps, we needed, of course, something that was newer and had more power than what we had. We were looking at something that was hyperconvergent, so we didn't have different solutions for different things. We considered other technology vendors when we were doing the renewal, so we took a look at Nutanix, took a look at going out of hyperconvergence and doing, you know, servers and storage and network separately. But the reality is the benefit that we have with hyperconvergence and having everything so easy, that was one of the things that attracted us to scale because we had everything in the same box. So it was easier to manage just one supplier, training for our technicians would be easier, and just managing it would be way easier. My implementation experience was very positive. We never had any downtime in the office when I came on and we did the first migrations and we started installing new applications into the servers. I thought that the process was really easy. In terms of our backup resilience strategy, we are using Scale Computing's provided backup solution, which is a partnership with Google Cloud, and we just send everything up into the cloud every time we do any type of backup. And of course, the support from Scale Computing is super nice with the chat that they have integrated and everything. We have had interactions with the support team. A few times that we've had to use it, it's worked awesome. In one of the first hardware experiences that we had with Scale, we had a couple of disks that went bad. We just went through the chat that they have in their dashboard. From there, Scale Computing connected, they checked, they saw that the hardware was faulty, and they just sent us a new disk that arrived next day and we just switched it over and the server does all the work of reintroducing that disk into the array. So it's really a very hands-off experience, except for just switching the hardware. And if we've had any issues, the response time is really fast. For the renewals, the process is real easy. We made the purchase order, we got the hardware in, we put it in the rack, we connected it to the old hardware that we were still having in use, and then we just did a migration process, just moving the VMs from one hardware to the other. It's funny because we normally don't communicate that, so we just do a change and then you start listening to people like, I mean, these processes are running faster than they were running. We're not complaining, but, and it's like, yeah, we just switched servers. People only knew when they got back and they saw that their applications were maybe performing better, and they were like, something's different here, but it's working perfect. So yeah, it's funny when you see that reaction of people. I would tell my peers about Scale Computing what I've always told them. I think it's an underutilized solution, a lot of people don't know about them, and I think that they do great work. We plan to keep using it in the future. It's a recommended solution for anyone that's looking to simplify their data center and have very good support with very good hardware that is pretty much trouble-free. So yeah, it's recommended on my end.
