 |
||||
|
|
|
||
|
Contents 
Introduction
Servcorp
Ausmelt
Suncorp
How to be an innovator
Executive Summary |
|
||
|
|
||||
|
|
||||
Although his job includes responsibility for IT, Matusewicz is a metallurgist by training and his main role involves research and development and setting up pilot plants using Ausmelt's technology. Consequently, he's happy to investigate the options when making an IT purchase. Matusewicz reports to the managing director and he has the authority to make the decisions, saving internal controversy. "At the end of the day, it's up to me," he says. "I just get asked the question 'is it going to work?'"
The increased use of digital images meant that by late 2002 it was apparent that the company's NT-based server was running out of storage space. Although the number of employees had remained fairly stable over a decade, the volume of data was exploding.
| "Warning bells should ring when suppliers fail to stand behind their products."
|
The main question was how well it would fit in to what is otherwise an all-Windows shop, but Apple reseller Designwyse offered the Xserve with a money-back guarantee that it would work successfully. "That was an enormous factor," says Matusewicz, who says that warning bells should ring when suppliers fail to stand behind their products in this way.
Discussions between the two companies continued over several months to establish the suitability of the product and any changes in practices that would be needed.
The Xserve was installed in mid-2003 and all went well. It is used for file storage rather than as an application server, and Windows users simply log on in the conventional manner and are given appropriate access.
More recently, the NT server has been replaced completely by another Intel-based server, this time using Microsoft's Small Business Server 2003 to accommodate a specific financial application, with the Xserve remaining as a file server. Matusewicz says Small Business Server is a very suitable product for companies such as Ausmelt, "but your software is costing you as much as the hardware" due to per-seat licensing. The Xserve includes an unlimited user licence. "I don't like the way Microsoft handles its licensing," he says, though Small Business Server does show that the company is now addressing the small business market.
Although Mac OS X Server can now connect to Active Directory as used by Windows Server, Matusewicz has not bothered to do so because there is no current need for this capability.
"The outcome [the selection of Xserve] may have been different if we had been looking at the financials and the storage requirement all at once," he says, but a Windows server would have cost one-and-a-half to two times as much as the Xserve, "and that was something you just couldn't ignore."
