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Testimonials & Case Studies

Green Bay Packaging

Green Bay Packaging $aves Thousands Each Month With the Help of AMI's MegaRAC G2

MegaRAC G2 for the paperboard packaging industry

Green Bay Packaging Inc., a privately owned, diversified manufacturer of paperboard packaging, has 29 plants that operate in 13 states. Its primary product is linerboard, which is supplied to Green Bay's 13 corrugated box plants and other manufacturers. The company also manufactures pressure sensitive label stock, building and lumber products and folding cartons.

Viable, low-cost method of remote server access

With plants spread throughout multiple states and an IT department located at the corporate office in Green Bay, WI, Green Bay Packaging needed a viable, low-cost method of remotely accessing the server consoles from one location in case of a power failure or other type of emergency. It also needed to find a hardware solution that would allow it to move from dedicated frame relay network to a Virtual Private Network (VPN), which would save it thousands of dollars each month in networking costs.

AMI supports MegaRAC G2 in Linux systems

Green Bay Packaging found its answer in AMI's MegaRAC G2 card and installed the card onto its cost-effective Linux systems. A huge advantage Green Bay Packaging saw in AMI and the MegaRAC G2 was its official support of the G2's use in Linux systems. The MegaRAC G2 also offers more features and better performance at almost half the price than comparable products in the industry.

MegaRAC G2 for server emergencies

Green Bay Packaging primarily uses the MegaRAC G2 for emergency purposes. If it can't contact the system, it can use the MegaRAC G2 to check and review the event log.

Immediate results with the MegaRAC G2

The company saw the results of the MegaRAC G2 card almost immediately after it installed the first one into a server at its Orlando plant. The plant had power problems, which caused the server to crash. Using the MegaRAC G2 card, the administrator was able to reboot the server remotely.

Problems can be remotely diagnosed

Before the company had the MegaRAC G2 installed, the administrator would have had to call upon the local IS Coordinator for assistance - at 8 p.m. in this case - to go to the plant and inspect the failure. Most likely, the IS Coordinator would have had to manually power cycle the server. If a power cycle of the system didn't fix the problem, or the problem was more severe, an IT team member would have had to go down to the plant and troubleshoot. Now with the MegaRAC G2 installed, the administrator can diagnose the system and fix most technical problems remotely.

The MegaRAC G2 will pay for itself over time

The MegaRAC G2 will pay for itself over time. It can solve more technical issues. “The MegaRAC G2 does everything we need it to do,” said Pete Starzewski, Network Systems Engineer at Green Bay Packaging. “We are very satisfied with the G2 cards.”

Digital Cinema Solutions

Digital Cinema Solutions, which enables digital cinema for independent theaters, has installed 26 MegaRAC G2 cards in unmanned locations throughout the United States.

“What most interested me in the G2 card is the ability to have remote, out of band, BIOS-level access to the system. The ability to look in on a down system without having to send someone was critical. Everything else the card does is great, including its extra-added features like receiving alerts and the fact that no drivers are required,” Director of Technology at Digital Cinema Solutions. “And, AMI's sales and technical support has been nothing but great.”

Network engineer - high-tech company with about 500 employees

The main reason I use MegaRAC G2 is to control our servers remotely. This is a much better solution than products such as pcAnywhere because it is hardware based. I can actually turn a server completely off and then back on, reset it, change settings in the BIOS or anything else I need to do. Also, if a server has crashed and can't be accessed from the network, I can still remotely control it with the G2. When using the G2, it is almost as if you were physically sitting in front of the server. I also use MegaRAC to monitor internal environmental conditions and alert me if certain thresholds are reached. The MegaRAC G2 is great tool to have; it saves trips to the office after hours and reduces downtime.

There have been numerous times when the MegaRAC G2 made my life easier, allowing me to remotely fix or prevent server problems:

Network administrator - healthcare

I am a network administrator at a city hospital. The IT department needed to make some changes. We needed to reduce manpower and create a centralized management facility for all resource equipment. After comparing other similar remote management products, we chose to install the MegaRAC G2 onto our Dell and Windows 2000 servers based on its performance and features. We especially liked the MegaRAC G2's ability to manage server resources from a central network-operation-center. We had been using PC anywhere, but we found the G2 was more to our advantage because of its ability to manage the resource at the hardware level.

Independent sales person - selling downloadable media via web site

I am a one-man show. I have a web site that sells downloadable media. My web site, which runs on a Linux-based server running Apache, is physically located in New York, NY. I, however, am in Atlanta, GA. I need my web server to be up at all times. If it goes down, I loose potential sales.

Before, when my server crashed, it took me a while to discover that the server had a problem. I usually found out that it had a problem when a buddy of mine called me and asked if my server was down.

Now, with the MegaRAC G2, I will receive an alert when my server stops responding. I can quickly and remotely cold boot it and even view the last screen before it crashed. I don't have to call the co-location facility and pay someone to reboot it or diagnose the problem. I can do it all from home.

Network administrator - telecommunications and athletic scoreboard industries

I have held two network administrator positions, one with a telecommunications company that had branches in 25 states, and now I'm with a company that makes high school, college and professional athletic score boards. The MegaRAC G2 will make any network administrator's life easier.

Like most network administrators, I report to the CFO - whose main concern is cost savings. With the G2, I can greatly reduce travel expenses. For example - when a system crashed, I would have to buy a costly, last minute ticket to get on-site and fix the problem. With the MegaRAC G2, I am now able to remotely manage the system from one location and greatly decrease my time traveling and traveling expenses.

Because the MegaRAC G2 is a hardware remote management solution, it offers a great security advantage. I can remotely see what's going on during boot up. My access to a BIOS password greatly limits who has access to the server and makes it easier to retain security using an encrypted hard drive. With a software solution, the password would only be accessible after boot up - if the server failed at boot up, I would have to tell someone the password, which would create a security hole. After the issue was fixed, I would have to change the password; adding to the company's time and expenses.

IT manager - small shipping company with 15 remote sites over 3 states

Being the sole employee in the IT department of a new shipping company with several remote sites that had very little space in those sites for storing the servers, I knew that it was time to look for a remote management solution. It was getting too hard and expensive for me to manage all of the deployed servers and I knew that the company had plans to double over the next five years.

With the MegaRAC G2 card, I was able to set up a centralized IT area at the company headquarters. Though we had supervisors at the remote locations, they were not very technical and didn't really know how to manage the systems. Plus the costs of the monitors, keyboards, CD-ROMs and the cable complexity was getting out of control.

Because our business structure allowed for a standard management of servers across the board, the G2 was a perfect match. We no longer have to deal with the timeliness for me to respond to the servers. The downtime of the servers was eliminated and we saved a considerable amount of money in my traveling expenses.

MIS director - large corporation with more than 1,000 employees

I am a strong believer in my Microsoft Terminal Server. It is fast... really fast. However, when the server hangs, it does not let me know. I usually find out when the CEO starts to sing. Before the G2 installation, I would have to send a tech down to the 10th floor to get to that server room, locate the server and physically cold boot it.

A friend of mine told me about the AMI MegaRAC G2 card. We installed them into 20 of our most critical servers. We set up the alert feature. Now, we receive an immediate alert when the server hangs. We can now remotely reboot and troubleshoot it. Now, no one notices when the server goes down. The CEO is happy and I am happy.

On the weekends, I assign a tech to remain in the office to monitor the servers, web traffic and guard against attacks. A popular attack is attacking through port 3389... Microsoft Terminal Services. Because of this, that port is not allowed through the firewall. The only way in is through the web and VPN.

A good user study I can tell you is this: I was visiting family in Vancouver, BC. My cell phone rang; it was the CEO. The mail server was down and my tech was nowhere to be found. I quickly borrowed my dad's computer and dialed into the firewall through the RAS server's G2's modem. Using text redirection, I enabled port 3389 and redirected it to the mail server's IP. I then logged out of the G2 and tried to log back in using Terminal Services Client - no luck. The mail server was totally down. I then redialed the RAS server's G2 and got into the firewall. I enabled the G2 port and redirected it to the mail server's G2 card. I established a connection to the mail server's G2 card and rebooted the mail server. The reboot solved the problem long enough for me to locate my tech and for my tech to replace the defective fan that caused the CPU to lockup.

Don't get me wrong. My network is as stable as a rock. Lockups, hard drive failures and other more common server problems are rare. However, keeping the servers up 99 percent of the time is my goal. The AMI MegaRAC G2 allows me to reach that goal.

Micro Media - Digital Video Editing & Storage

AMI StorTrends NAS software - “installs in 5 minutes, loads in 30 seconds and has 4 times the performance of a W2K server”

Micro Media integrates and sells turnkey digital video editing systems and storage. It has served the broadcast and production industry for over 10 years.

Micro Media needed a turnkey storage solution for high bandwidth storage like graphics and video. Its customers, typically video producers for cable televisions systems and government videos, have storage requirements ranging from 144 GBs to several TBs.

Micro Media chose to implement a NAS system rather than a standard server for the benefits of performance, simplicity and reliability.

After evaluating the options in the industry, Micro Media chose AMI's NAS software, which was created to turn almost any standard server or desktop into a storage solution.

Micro Media installed the software onto several different hardware configurations. These systems include a single PIII 1 GHZ and 2x120 GB of ATA133 IDE storage and a Dual Xeon 2.4 GHz with 1.2 Terabytes of Ultra320 storage.

Micro Media used AMI's NAS software for “near-online” and “on-line” storage for video editing. The idea behind Micro Media's solution is to give several editors access to the same material for production from a central location. The goal is to have the bandwidth high enough across the network for the material to be used the same as if it were stored locally on the user's workstation. Depending on customer needs, Micro Media uses mirroring (RAID 1) for safety or striping (RAID 0) for performance. In all cases, the NAS is connected to a 1Gb network.

Compared to the previous storage solution it was using, Micro Media has seen several advantages with AMI's NAS software, including: