Monthly Archives: March 2012

Com Com simplifies hardware maintenance for major educational establishment

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Background

In December 2009 a high profile educational organisation sought competitive pricing for support of their Sun servers and storage as the multiple contracts held with Sun began to come up for renewal. After a successful initial period supporting over ninety Sun servers plus storage pro-rated into one contract, a tender was initiated for multi-vender support for the whole Sun estate together with Dell and IBM RS6000 servers and storage.

Client Objectives

  • Significant cost savings
  • Flexible SLAs to cover the needs of a diverse estate
  • Multi-vendor support
  • Simplified contract and billing
  • Enhanced support for critical operational periods
  • Continuity of support for older kit

Com Com’s Approach

  • One week on-site engineering with enhanced spares for critical operational periods
  • On-site spare kits to assist with SLA all year round
  • One flexible contract (replacing more than thirty) allowing equipment to be added and removed, pro-rating as required
  • Dedicated engineers and account management

Business Outcomes

  • Support costs reduced by around 50%
  • One supplier, one contract and quarterly billing greatly reduce management overhead
  • Greater peace of mind with on-site engineers and spares around critical operational periods

Hardware and Software Support Provided

  • 24×7 cover with 4 hour response time
  • 90+ Sun servers, 19 storage
  • 80 Dell servers and storage
  • IBM estate of servers and storage
  • TAG Solaris, Windows and AIX support

Let us buy your old servers and networking equipment

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Don’t let your old kit gather dust. Contact us today and turn your obsolete computer equipment into cash.

At Com-Com we specialize in breathing life into old, obsolete servers and networking equipment. We take the outdated, unwanted kit that’s cluttering up your storerooms and we renovate, recycle and refurbish to give it a new lease of life.

We’re looking to buy new, used and obsolete equipment from a wide range of manufacturers: Bull, EMC, Cisco, HP, IBM, Dell, Sun/Oracle and others and can offer you a simple, practical and lucrative way to get rid of your old servers and networking equipment.

What’s in it for you?

  1. Let us take care of RoHS and WEEE compliant disposal. Disposing of computer equipment is not as simple as it used to be since the introduction of EU wide legislation on the disposal of hazardous substances. Selling your old equipment to Com-Com avoids the complications and hassles of compliant disposal.
  2. Free up valuable space in your offices and storerooms. We visit a lot of customer sites and are always surprised by the quantity of disused equipment lying around and taking up space in computer rooms and warehouses. Selling your old equipment to Com-Com removes unwanted clutter and allows you to use your office space more efficiently.
  3. Turn your unwanted equipment from a liability into an asset. Finally, we pay our partners maximum value for their unwanted equipment. Instead of gathering dust, let it gather some cash.

We’ll consider any type of networking or server equipment, no matter how old or obsolete.

So if you’re tripping over ancient hard drives or buried beneath a mountain of ageing network equipment send us an email or call us on 0845 643 1180 to find out how we can help.

Get the best deal on your IT maintenance at renewal time

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We save our customers an average of more than 30% over manufacturers’ prices

With IT budgets tighter than ever before and expenditure coming under increasing scrutiny it might be time for your company to do something different this year. If you’re looking for saving and efficiencies in 2012, your IT maintenance contract is somewhere you could make instant, significant savings.

Manufacturer maintenance is often seen as the gold-standard for IT support so it’s not surprising that many companies choose to stick with their manufacturer when it comes to providing the day-to-day support that keeps their systems running. What many people don’t realize is that third party maintenance providers can offer a better, faster, more personalized and flexible service at a fraction of the cost.

3 reasons to choose choose Com-Com instead of your manufacturer for IT maintenance in 2012

  1. 30% cost reduction. We aim to beat your manufacturer’s price by at least 30%. We have much lower overheads than the likes of Oracle and IBM so we’re able to offer significant instant savings. That’s money that can go on other projects, equipment or human resources.
  2. More flexible, friendlier service. We try to offer customers the package that suits them. You can add or remove items from your support contract whenever it suits you and choose the right response level for your precise needs. We’ll tailor a package that suits you and then provide you with a dedicated engineer.
  3. The expertise to support multiple vendors. Most companies have a variety of equipment on site. This usually means any number of different support contracts with any number of vendors. Working with Com-Com means a single contract, a single point of contact and huge savings across your IT infrastructure. Our team of manufacturer-trained engineers have the expertise and experience to support equipment from EMC, Sun/Oracle, IBM, Cisco, HP, Bull, NetApp, Dell and many others so that you can benefit from cost savings across the board.

More and more people are turning to third party maintainers like Com-Com at renewal time and benefiting from a better service and a much better price.

Why not send us an email or call us on 0845 643 1180 to find out how we can help you.

 

The three most common issues in Storage Area Networks

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Simple configuration issues that impact your SAN performance

As an experienced maintainer of EMC and other SAN hardware, we see a lot of Storage Area Networks. While SANs may have been optimally configured at installation, their configuration and use may have evolved over time and problems can creep in.  Our engineers have noticed significant numbers of SANs which are no longer configured in line with best practice. Many customers don’t realise that their SAN is not working at its optimum and may be unaware that they are running unnecessary risks with their data.

Here are the top 3 SAN issues we encounter.

  • LUNs bound to system drives. Drives 0-4 are reserved as system drives to run the array’s O/S. In 90% of the systems we check, we see these drives being used for mission critical storage. It’s a simple, basic error that impacts system performance yet only one in ten of the SANs we check is configured correctly.
  • Use of SATA drives for virtualization. Both EMC and VMWare advise against this practice, warning of the performance and throughput impact it has. Yet we see this being done in more than 70% of the SANs we check.
  • Poor metaLUN implementation. Configuring metaLUNs incorrectly can pose serious risks for data corruption through hardware failure. We see this in more than 60% of the SANs we check.

These are simple issues to correct but they often go unnoticed for years, until a problem arises and the data is corrupted or until we send an engineer to perform a SAN Health Check.

Make sure your SAN is in optimum health

Com-Com are offering a free EMC SAN Health Check to the first ten respondents to this email.

The health check consists of a day’s consultancy, worth £1,200, where one of our qualified engineers will come out to your site and run through a comprehensive audit schedule in order to identify any faults or areas for concern with your EMC storage array.

Within ten days of the site visit we will provide you with a full report of our findings, together with recommendations on ensuring your equipment is working to its optimum performance level.

Call us on 0845 643 1180 or click below to claim your free SAN Health Check.