Tuesday, April 17, 2012

SMB Success Stories - Myron Steves and Company Slashes Disaster Recover Costs with VMware

Original Post: http://blogs.vmware.com/smb/2012/04/myron-steves.html

[http://blogs.vmware.com/.a/6a00d8341c328153ef016304444e39970d-320wi]<http://blogs.vmware.com/.a/6a00d8341c328153ef016304444e39970d-pi>While we already have tens hundreds of thousands of SMB customers today, we're building the SMB Business Unit to deliver even greater focus on the needs of Small and Mid-Size Businesses. Our goal is simple – we want to provide solutions that drive Real Advantage for our Customers by simplifying their IT environments and making IT a competitive advantage for their business.

When I talk with customers, I am always impressed with their stories and wanted to share one with you. Myron F. Steves and Company is a Houston-based insurance wholesaler that deployed virtualization and cloud solutions from VMware to help ensure the company's 200 employees can respond to customers should disaster strike. Myron Steves serves more than 3,000 independent insurance agencies and as you can imagine, they cannot afford the risk of being incapacitated in the event of a disaster. With the virtualized architecture enabled by VMware, Myron Steves is able to fail over to backup servers within hours instead of days - server failover is now a reliable process and the company has reduced IT costs significantly.

To cut to the chase, Myron Steves eliminated $400,000 in annual costs for a 3rd-party disaster recovery service; saved $200,000 in yearly payroll costs in the IT department; reduced maintenance costs by $150,000 per year and deployed 100+ Virtual Desktops to enable employees to work from anywhere. In addition, after escaping the third-most expensive hurricane in U.S. history as Hurricane Ike hit in nearby Galveston, Texas, Myron Steves realized quickly how critical implementing a disaster recovery strategy would be to their bottom line. They needed a simpler and more reliable solution that would enable IT infrastructure to seamlessly failover in the event of a data center outage and also ensure that the company's voice-over-IP (VoIP) phones wouldn't go down with the data center. After evaluating other solutions from Citrix and Microsoft, Myron Steves chose VMware for its cost effectiveness, simplicity and reliability. Additionally, by leveraging VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager<http://bit.ly/IAcHoB>, Myron Steves automated server replication between its Houston and San Antonio offices, allowing the company to run its entire infrastructure from the San Antonio office in just a few hours compared with ten days or more using a disaster recovery vendor. Read the full story here<http://bit.ly/HOK3n1>.

Myron Steves is another example of a company that used technology to drive Real World Advantage while simplifying their IT environment, containing costs and increasing employee productivity. What's your story? I am eager to hear your stories about how and why you decided to implement VMware and how our solutions and partners helped your company deploy virtualization, business continuity and disaster recovery solutions. I am also very interested to learn where we need to improve....so please share your thoughts.

Until next time…

Brandon

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