Benefits of a Service Desk

There are many benefits and advantages of a using a service desk in business today. Many large companies are now using service desk solutions to help reduce their overall service costs. The main types of service desk are:

 

• Call Centre: Only call dispatching, no other services.
• Unskilled Service Desk: Call dispatching, incident tracking, feedback to clients.
• Skilled Service Desk: Large numbers of incidents are solved at the Service Desk.
• Expert Service Desk: Incorporates Incident Management and Problem Management. Most incidents are solved at the Service Desk.

 

The benefits to the business can affect many areas including the end user, staff and management as well as the overall company.

 

The service desk can provide the end user with a single point of contact (SPOC) this can be in the form of an email, phone call or via a web portal. This enables the facility to record the issue or request a service depending on the business needs. If available, users could make use of an online knowledge base and FAQs for self-help and keep track on issues and requests that they have placed earlier.

 

Staff who are employed on a service desk have the benefit of a centralised database to record incidents and requests, classify and escalate to a higher level or third party if needed. Staff can also make use of a built in knowledge base to help resolve issues as quickly as possible thus increasing client/customer satisfaction. Depending on the systems in use, automated escalation and SLA can also help staff keep track of incident and resolution timescales.

 

Management will have the ability to produce statistical information to report on performance, resolution rates, and overall customer satisfaction.

 

Businesses need technical service desks to resolve service management issues consistently and efficiently. By centralising incident resolution, request management and reporting, infrastructure support becomes easier and most cost effective for the business.

 

A Service Desk provides:

• Increased customer service perception and satisfaction.
• Increased access to assistance through a single point of contact.
• Improved quality and quicker resolution of customer incidents and requests.
• Improved staff teamwork and communication.
• Enhanced focus and a proactive approach to service provision.
• Improved usage of IT support resources and increased productivity of business personnel.
• Enables businesses to cut downtime significantly and to decrease service-impacting events, assuring a higher Quality of Service.
• Reduced costs i.e. Staff training, user self-service and minimise on-site support.

 

Companies from all over the world are now using service desk solutions simply because they benefit in so many areas, no matter what their business needs are.

 

Should you wish to learn more information about Celerity's Service Desk offerings please contact Celerity Limited

 

Gary Eckman - Technical Support - Celerity Limited

 

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Celerity Launches 'PowerForce' Program

Celerity launches its Power Force program aimed at existing IBM POWER customers with older POWER servers to demonstrate how they can drastically reduce their operating costs by running workloads unchanged on current POWER servers.

 

With IT budgets under constant strain Celerity has developed the Power Force program to allow customers to exploit both the short and medium term savings driven by refreshing their AIX infrastructure, usually delivering some in year savings with significant savings from year two onwards. These savings are driven by a reduction in hardware and software maintenance costs, reduced power and cooling costs, the reduction of data centre footprint, and significantly reduced software licensing costs driven by the reduction in the number of processors needed to provide equivalent performance.

 

The integrated program developed by Celerity’s Business Development Manager Alan Mackenzie-Wintle and Technical Director Chris Hall is designed to be self-funding, quick to implement, and non-disruptive as it requires very little technical input from the customer.

 

Using our technology model which has been built up utilising Celerity’s experience in POWER systems over the last 10 years, we are able to give customers an estimate of the typical savings that can be made over a three year period within 24 hours of engagement. This is followed by a detailed study, which takes approximately two weeks to carry out, and results in a report containing both detailed information of the savings available on the customer’s specific estate together with details of a costed target server infrastructure. In many cases we are able to provide this study at limited or no cost to the customer.

Celerity started the program earlier in the year but wanted to extend the service to a wider audience because of its success. Peter Reakes, Celerity Sales Director commented, "We have been able to show major savings sometimes in seven figures across a variety of customers and wanted to broaden the reach of service. In many instances we can show savings in year one, even with the capital costs of new servers, then greater savings in years two and three. Even customers who consider their Power AIX estate as legacy and have plans to migrate to different platforms can often benefit due to the scale and immediacy of the savings".

 

For more details on the Celerity Power Force Program please contact your Celerity Representative or email: marketing@celerity-uk.com

Is The Time Right to Move to LTO-6?

 

Posted on: 19/09/13

Most customers who have invested in tape backup are using one generation or another of LTO drives. Particularly those who were using LTO-3/4 in a library didn’t require the extra capacity of LTO-5 or features such as encryption are still using this technology and are wondering if the time is right to look at the new generation of LTO-6 Ultrium tape drives (or a least that’s what I was asked recently).

The tapes now come in capacities ranging up to 6.25TB of compressed data or 2.5TB uncompressed. As all generations of LTO tape you can read/write to the previous tape model, in this case LTO-5 tapes, and will read tapes two generations back (LTO-4 tapes). The Ultrium 6250 also now interfaces via 6GB/s SAS as well as Fibre Channel, this largely depends on whether you opt for a standalone drive or library. As with LTO-5 it also supports encryption at the drive level meaning encryption is fast and doesn’t add overhead to the backup server. I’ve also seen more and more that data encryption is becoming a mandatory requirement for organisations to ensure the secure handling of customer’s sensitive data.

They’ve also improved how the hardware compression works, so in terms of additional capacity LTO-6 tapes feature improvements over LTO-5 that are notable and shouldn't be overlooked. LTO-5 drives compressed at a ratio of 2:1, whereas LTO-6 is capable of a 2.5:1. That enables a capacity rise up to 2.5TB compared to 1.5TB on LTO-5. LTO-6 features improved data transfer speeds stretching up to 160MB/s from 140MB/s on LTO-5 so not only will you get more data on a tape it will also be written more quickly.

 

So back to the original question - is the time right to move to LTO-6? As always this largely depends on requirements. Do you need the additional capacity and performance or features such as data encryption?

 

One thing that’s always important to factor in is the cost of tapes that you are presently using; if you are currently using LT0-3 or older you will definitely need to replace all of your current tape cartridges. This for some is a bigger cost than purchasing the new drives.

Another option worth considering is by introducing SAN attached data de-dupe technologies in conjunction with tape backup/archive rather than refreshing the tape backup. This gives greater scope and flexibility with the technology being used and could reduce your costs in the long term; however this is a topic of discussion for another day.

 

If you wish to discuss other options or require further information please contact Celerity Limited.
 

Neil Hulme, Technical Consultant, Celerity Limited

 

Why is the IBM Storwize V7000 So Successful?

 

Posted on: 12/09/13

 

IBM has a great mid-range storage system offering that fits most business needs and has been successfully adopted by many clients worldwide for a few years now; and is still as strong as ever. It even would not look out of place in the Enterprise arena based on its scalability, but how did it gain such market adoption and momentum from its debut and how has it managed to remain a key player ever since?

When the product was launched it was advertised as a new product that was leading edge and not bleeding edge. But what does this mean? This requires a little history lesson. Years back IBM launched an enterprise class storage virtualisation device called the SAN Volume Controller (SVC) that promised to increase performance and add functionality to both your current and future storage systems. And it delivered.
 

Unfortunately it had a price tag as equally impressive. Due to the success and capabilities of the SVC, an entry edition was launched which offered similar hardware but with a revised pricing structure to make it affordable in the mid-market sector.
 

Because of the increased demand for the SVC portfolio, a package built around the IBM SVC and IBM DS5000 storage was launched known as the IBM Virtual Disk Solution (VDS). This brought with it the values of the SVC’s storage virtualisation along with actual storage capacity meaning it was suited to both current and new storage implementations.
 

But it turns out this product was just to ‘test the water’ so to speak. Having proven a demand for a new storage system that not only offered its own virtualised storage but could virtualise currently deployed IBM and non-IBM storage, the Storwize V7000 was born.
 

As opposed to the VDS package which included the two separate SVC nodes, associated UPSs and a DS5000 storage controller (and expansions), the Storwize V7000 brought all of this in to one physical 2U package. This runs the same code as the current Enterprise class SVCs, has all the resilience of a clustered SVC, and supports both its own internal and any other external storage which it then virtualises bringing its rich feature set to it. History lesson over.
 

The latest release of the Storwize V7000 code offers these key features:
 

• Scale-up with support for 240 internal disks and scale-out allowing for 4 dual-node controllers to be clustered as one logical V7000 supporting 960 internal disks and petabytes of externally virtualised storage, all managed through a single web based intuitive GUI.

• Real-time compression creating up to 80% space savings and increased performance for tier 1+ production applications and databases.

• EasyTier support which automatically and dynamically places compressed and uncompressed hot-data from normal hard disks on to SSDs bringing massive performance benefits with just a small amount of SSD.

• Synchronous and asynchronous replication to another V7000 or SVC for disaster recovery.

• Unified version available adding NAS protocol support such as CIFS and NFS to the system.

• Typical virtualisation features included such as snapshots, thin-provisioning, non-disruptive volume migration etc.

• Migration wizard to massively simplify and minimise the risk associated with migrating data from one storage system to another (itself or otherwise).
 

So, to answer the question as to why the V7000 is so successful ... there is little like it in the market place and by being cost competitive, incredibly simple and intuitive to manage, and offering everything and more than its competitors, it is difficult to find a storage infrastructure where it does not fit with a client’s business needs.

 

For more information on IBM Storwize V7000 please contact your Celerity Representatve

Edward Yates, Technical Consultant, Celerity Limited

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Celerity Achieves ISO 14001 Accreditation

Celerity is delighted to announce that in addition to retaining the ISO 9001 Quality Management Standard for a further year, it has now also achieved the ISO:14001 Environmental Management Standard, strengthening the organisation’s continued commitment to quality delivery whilst managing and reducing business impacts on the environment.
This independent assessment was conducted by a leading Certification Body, the British Assessment Bureau and recognises Celerity as an environmentally responsible business, committed to reducing environmental impacts and meeting expectations for sustainable success.

ISO 14001:2004 was first introduced in 1996 as a British Standard and requires organisations to adopt an environmental policy and action plan to manage their impact on their environment. Certified organisations are committed to continuous improvement and are assessed annually to ensure progress is being maintained.

Now an internationally accepted standard, ISO 14001 acknowledges that Celerity has implemented an effective environmental management system and as a business can remain commercially successful without overlooking its environmental responsibilities. The standard also ensures that as the company grows, environmental impact will not grow alongside it. ISO 14001 provides the framework to allow Celerity to meet increasingly high customer expectations and demands of corporate responsibility as well as legal or regulatory requirements.

During a time when virtualisation, consolidation, energy efficiency and sustainability are all key priorities on the IT agenda as organisations strive to achieve environmental excellence, the ISO 14001 certification proves Celerity’s long term commitment to the environment together with good practice and the ability to help other companies meet their own environmental objectives. Celerity commits to continue encouragement of reducing the company’s carbon footprint which will contribute positively to the natural environment.

Chris Wilson, Commercial Director said,

"We are delighted to have achieved ISO:14001 accreditation as we feel we have a moral duty to help ease pressure on the environment. To be recognised by this international standard confirms our commitment to contribute positively to our natural environment. This goes hand-in-hand with a lot of work we do for our clients. Consolidating and virtualising their datacenter’s infrastructures provides them with huge cost and efficiency savings as well as reducing their carbon footprints by dramatically cutting their power usage."

To see more information please visit http://www.celerity-uk.com/news/214/celerity-achieves-iso-14001-accreditation