Original Parts Group, Incorporated is a manufacturer and retailer of quality restoration parts for classic GM muscle cars of the ‘60s and ‘70s.
How It Began
At Original Parts Group, our objective is to serve the classic car enthusiast and promote the restoration hobby. Our newest warehouse has more than 50,000 restoration parts and accessories and has been optimized to deliver products to our customers in the most efficient and timely manner. Our customers expect the best, and we don’t disappoint. Behind the scenes, our employees not only appreciate the technology we have developed, but can always count on the speed and reliability of our Dell computers. When you’re a winner, you’ve got to go with a winner! That’s’ why we only use Dell computers for our servers and workstations.
Challenge
Our business model is constantly evolving at Original Parts Group. On the inside, our culture has always been about technology and creative ways to analyze our business, our customers and suppliers. The challenge is how to harness that technology to improve our services and supply. Dell Computers provide the speed and platform for ever higher intelligence. Whether it’s a complicated manufacturing project or a number crunching analytic, Dell is the platform that we rely on day in, day out.
Solution
The main issues we have going forward are about technology platform hardware replenishment, including consolidation and convergence of platforms since many approaching the end of line (EOL). All of this needs to be done while maintaining a High Availability (HA) environment. With Dell’s new line of multi-core servers outfitted with Nehalem Intel core, we are confident that not only will we be able to accomplish this, but with increased power and computing efficiencies as a direct result. This is a huge benefit because in the past we were dealing with more costs for hardware/licenses with little business benefit. Also, staging multiple development instances, while maintaining complete autonomy from critical production environments, remain key to evolving customer-friendly application enhancements, without affecting production systems. Multi-core systems with functionality such as ‘core parking’ and Hyper-V will allow us to have multiple development environments on a single box.
Summary
We would like to purchase servers that have increased core computing, more flexibility in managing environments, more clustering options for more fault-tolerant arrays of servers. Our plans include a serious Microsoft Hyper-V presence, allowing us to reduce server hardware by 30 percent, yet maintain separate environments for those applications that run best in their own operating system. This will allow us to reduce our power consumption, from both server hardware and the costs to cool them, without sacrificing computing power. What would also be helpful is the pooling available CPU within a computing Enterprise and having any server with available CPU/RAM resources to be able to be handed a task from any other server to maximize processing efficiency. More complete utilization of currently under-utilized environments for tasks where other servers may be busy would help us get to the finish line faster and be a more efficient use of existing resources.