|
In just a few years, Norcraft Companies grew from a
single millwork manufacturing facility in Cottonwood,
Minn. into one the nation's top five largest
cabinetry makers. Through a series of strategic
acquisitions begun in 2000, Norcraft now has six
manufacturing facilities in the U.S. and Canada, and
eight service centers and retail stores located in
Sun Belt states where the housing construction market
is red hot.
Along the way, Norcraft acquired several disparate
information systems and a fragmented hub-and-spoke
network infrastructure. This presented a unique
challenge to Darin Wipf, director of IT. In order to
manage this diverse network and all its users, a
monitoring platform with a user perspective from each
site was needed. Wipf was well aware of the hidden
costs associated with most monitoring tools, and the
time, travel, and additional hardware and software
required was going to be simply too expensive and cumbersome.
Wipf's team was spread out over North America, so
he needed a tool that would provide a bird's-eye view
of the network. Furthermore, he needed to create customized
role-based access privileges for his employees.
Wipf immediately recognized the power of Jumpnode's
distributed architecture. "I like the idea of having a
separate hardware appliance running an embedded operating
system, instead of dealing with software you have to install
and maintain," he says. Jumpnode's appliances are
tied to a hosted service, which eliminates the hidden costs
associated with competitive software products. Because the
portal is hosted, remote access is easy for both administrators
and help desk individuals. An appliance at each remote location
is configured remotely to check the same system at one of the
two Norcraft data-centers. This provides the user perspective
critical to a network with centralized resources.
Alerts are sent to the team closest to the troubled equipment.
If a problem is not resolved within a predetermined time,
it is then escalated to a manager. Some individuals in the
system can be configured for read-only access. This is
beneficial for help desk personnel who might need access to
the secure portal from home.
Wipf and his staff had Jumpnode drop ship all the units
from its fulfillment center in Minneapolis. After units
were shipped to all sites across the United States and Canada,
Wipf instructed a person at each site to simply plug in the
appliance to the network and power it on. That was the extent
of the install.
Immediately, they were able to use the "user perspective"
feature of the product to see systems exactly as users did from
their own network. When a user has an issue at one of these
remote sites, Wipf and his team can quickly see if the appliance
on the site can access that resource as well. If it can, the
problem is likely not the local network and the team can then
focus on the user.
The result is that Wipf and his staff are able to solve problems
faster, often before problems have an impact on users. "A lot
of times, I'm aware of a network outage before the end user
even calls," Wipf says. "As soon as there's a problem,
we're on it right away."
Jumpnode fulfills critical needs for network administrators, which
enables them to focus on other business functions. Jumpnode provides
peace of mind, with fool-proof operation, elegant hardware and
off-site data backup.
|
