One of the great opportunities about my job is that I get to travel onsite to customer locations, usually capture their story on video video . Earlier this year, I had the experience of traveling to Maine via Boston in the middle of winter – rough for a Texan! With my director, Arlette, in tow, we packed up the car in Boston and drove about 3.5 hours until we arrived in Lewiston, home of Northeast Bank.
The next day we were up bright and early — and after scraping the ice off the rental car, we were on our way! The Northeast Bank employees were such gracious hosts to have Dell onsite, especially with all our video equipment. After spending the morning with members of the IT department, Greg and Drew, their IT challenges were real to me.
Reducing complexity and enabling employees to do their jobs more efficiently are two of the most important goals of the eight-person IT staff.
“All the regulations that apply to big banks apply to us, and we perform the same due diligence and the same compliance. The major difference is that we don’t have deep pockets. A dollar that we spend has to serve the greater good of the company and the communities we serve,” said Greg Thompson, vide president, Northeast Bank.
By using virtualization technology they were able to virtualize up to 50 servers using PowerEdge 2950 servers. An important part of that value proposition is the virtualized storage that the bank acquired with Dell EqualLogic PS5000XV and PS5000E iSCSI SAN arrays. By refreshing their technology the company saved 25-30 percent of its utility costs for power and cooling and avoided the cost of having to buy another cooling unit for the data center.
It’s a great experience for me to see how technology enables businesses to become more efficient. Despite the cold, this Texan soon realized how gorgeous the winter can be in Maine. Maybe next time, I’ll go when it’s a little warmer!
