Business Trailblazer Troy Hoffman

We opened our doors on January 7, 2007 with two couches and two rolls of toilet paper. Sine then, we’ve quickly grown thanks to our focus on developing some of the most technologically advanced services in the industry. With bootstrapping at its finest, we’ve pushed the boundaries of what is possible with zero financing behind it. Much of this growth has occurred due to maximizing all of the technology products available out there, so we can immediately have the same functionality and abilities of a much larger company. This has allowed us to spend our money on developing a highly robust custom application on an ASP.net platform with an SQL back-end running on Dell servers.

With our current setup, we are able to take advantage of virtualization, but without the full benefits of having a shared storage space where, among other things, we can migrate virtual machines, live. The challenge is to find an adequate SAN product which is affordable, but also provides the high availability features (redundant controllers, power supplies, spare hard disks, etc.) that our operation requires.

We face many of the same challenges large businesses today face, but we must do more with less staff and less resources. Both our internal staff and clients demand 24-hour access to information, which includes everything from e-mail to reporting. Yet, we must do this with practically zero downtime and still provide secure, robust solutions. Dell’s server products have provided a secure, firm foundation to build virtualized solutions on and allow us to easily scale in response to need. The PowerEdge product’s expandability and reliability allow us to harness great amounts of power with less resources and capital.

We're looking to purchase an iSCSI SAN array to maximize our virtualization environment, which will allow live migration of servers for planned maintenance, as well as redundancy in case of equipment failure.