Leaflet

“We had a lot of old equipment,” he says. “We had
virus attacks. We had a primary server go down
for two days. Our e-mail was hosted, and we had
very little administrative control. We really needed to
rebuild our infrastructure from the ground up.”
A major technology upgrade wasn’t in the dealership’s
operating budget, so Keeler took matters into his own
hands and entered the IT Midmarket Makeover contest
sponsored by HP, Microsoft, and AMD.
An infrastructure in a box
Much to Keeler’s surprise and delight, his
essay describing Menlove’s plans for enhanced
technology—and compelling photo of the dealership’s
existing “server room”—won the contest. One
otherwise normal work day, he was greeted by
a gift-wrapped HP BladeSystem c3000 Enclosure
featuring four HP ProLiant BL465c server blades.
Designed specifically for midsize businesses,
the c3000 “Shorty” enclosure consolidates the
essential elements of a data center—power, cooling,
management, connectivity, redundancy, and security—
into a small, manageable footprint.
The server blades run Microsoft Windows Essential
Business Server 2008 Premium Edition, an enterprise-
class operating system and software platform
designed to provide midsize businesses with an
all-in-one solution.
“Windows Essential Business Server 2008 gives us
the security, management, messaging, and database
server all in one. It’s an infrastructure in a box,”
says Keeler. “And the HP BladeSystem gives us the
expandability we need to grow the business. This is
cutting-edge technology—not a lot of dealerships can
compete with our new infrastructure.”
Zero downtime with the HP BladeSystem
For service and support on the solution, Menlove relies
on HP Partner Canon Business Solutions. “We haven’t
run into any questions yet that Canon can’t answer,”
says Keeler. “They were very helpful in getting
everything up and running and properly configured.”
If Canon’s engineers need to check the status of
Menlove’s servers or perform administration tasks,
they have the option of connecting remotely using
HP Integrated Lights-Out 2 (iLO 2) software, a
feature of HP Insight Control Environment (ICE) for
BladeSystem. Using this tool allows Canon to provide
faster response, save trips to the dealership, and avoid
disrupting business activities at Menlove.
Keeler is able to take care of most routine server
maintenance himself, however, using HP management
tools. “The Onboard Administrator for the
HP BladeSystem enclosure and HP Systems Insight
Manager on the server blades provide us with a
broad and deep view of what’s going on, and the
interfaces are very intuitive,” Keeler reports.
One HP GbE2c Ethernet Blade Switch provides a
full set of industry standard Gigabit Ethernet Layer 2
features, while an HP StorageWorks SB40c storage
blade provides over 500 gigabytes of capacity.
“That’s five times as much space as we had on our
old systems,” says Keeler. “We won’t need to expand
our storage for a long time. Cabling is much cleaner
now. And we haven’t had any downtime since the
HP BladeSystem was installed.”
2
“We haven’t had any downtime
since the HP BladeSystem was
installed.”
Scott D. Keeler, MBA,
Administrator, Menlove Toyota
Scion