Shands Healthcare Success Story
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Key benefits:- reduced administrative time and support expense - better control of server and network performance - improved network availability |
"Server Manager is the perfect replacement for Onsite Admin Pro, but it also adds several layers of centralized remote management that we can use to decrease the amount of time spent on NetWare."
Lewis Drageset
Network Administrator
Shands HealthCare, Florida, USA
Customer Background
Shands HealthCare, affiliated with the University of Florida Health Science Center, is one of the premiere health systems in the Southeast. At the heart of Shands HealthCare are nine not-for-profit hospitals and more than 1,500 affiliated University of Florida and community physicians, covering virtually every medical specialty and providing everything from family practice and pediatrics to behavioral health and highly specialized, medically complex care such as trauma, transplantation and neurosurgery.
The Challenge
Lewis Drageset, responsible for overseeing 40+ NetWare servers in the Shands infrastructure, explains the reason for adopting Server Manager: "Before AdRem's program, we used to troubleshoot our NetWare servers with Onsite Admin Pro – Novell's old freeware utility. It helped us compare NLMs and SET commands on NetWare when we had problems with a server and needed to make sure its NLMs were up to date. However, we got away from using it [Onsite], because it wasn't very stable and hadn't been updated since 1998. During my recent research on Adrem, I determined that Server Manager will help us make our Netware more stable and allow us to do some much needed performance tweaks. And I found that, unlike Onsite, Server Manager is compatible with the latest NetWare editions."
The AdRem Solution
The Shands network professionals appreciated various unique features of the AdRem's tool. These include real-time server performance and connection monitoring; file, directory and trustee management, NLM management, plus quick access to all SET variables as well as configuration and system logs. Performing these tasks without Server Manager either required using diverse applications, or was was not possible at all.
"Each of our 40+ servers has about 10 or 15 critical environmental set commands and countless NLMs that we have to manage. When dealing with one server at a time, this is very time consuming," said Drageset. However, Server Manager brings all SET parameters in one clear list, and allows the Shands IT team to quickly view and edit configuration and system files of multiple servers at a time. It also displays all NLMs with information on how much server memory and processor resources are used by them, plus makes it easy to compare NLM configurations between servers.
When asked about the savings made possible by Server Manager, Drageset mentioned improved IT staff productivity and decreased server downtime. Explaining in more detail, he said: "I would assume that since we are getting NLM issues under control, and can quickly edit and replace config files, troubleshooting takes much less time. Instead of going through each server, we can remotely down all the servers at once, or automatically distribute software to multiple servers. Another great thing about this tool is the fast remote console, which spares us the hassle of going to the physical console. If I had to go back and do all these things without Server Manager, it would take me much more time, especially in the heat of the moment."
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