DEMAND GENERATOR: Don Kerzel, Cascade Computer Maintenance

Originally called in to upgrade a wheezing custom server, Cascade Computer Maintenance over the past four years has built a solid foundation with customer Colson and Colson, a 50-person general contractor of retirement homes based in Salem, Ore.

Since that original contact, Cascade has deployed close to a half-dozen Acer America servers as Colson and Colson has taken on a more sophisticated infrastructure. In addition, the VAR has been responsible for specifying and deploying Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint applications for Colson and Colson's headquarters and more than a dozen of its field offices. And more recently, Cascade has built a set of managed services using an offering from HyBlue to provide remote monitoring for Colson and Colson's network.

Peter Hafner, accounting manager and de facto IT executive at Colson and Colson, said he originally was interested in using Cascade because of its ability to respond quickly to his technology needs.

"Size was a major factor—they had the resources," Hafner said. "As we started to grow from that point, it became necessary for us to have a quick response time."

It also helped that Cascade had a good working relationship with Bennett/Porter and Associates, Tigard, Ore., which Colson and Colson had tapped to upgrade its aging DOS-based accounting software. Indeed, the firm's migration to Windows-based MAS software was the impetus for the original custom server upgrade, Hafner said.

But Don Kerzel, director of sales and marketing at Salem-based Cascade, said his company wasn't convinced Colson and Colson could rely much longer on that server. Even as it handled the upgrade, Cascade recommended new server hardware from Acer. Six months later, Colson and Colson agreed it was time.

As Cascade has deployed additional applications over the years, the solution provider has continued to use the same Acer server configuration, memory footprint, RAID and so forth, Kerzel said, to help make on-site support simpler. A spare server sits at the ready should one fail. "Every server is identical so the warm spare has the same components in it," he said.

The only exception: An IBM rack-mount server system running Veritas Backup Exec 10 was deployed to run disk-to-disk and disk-to-tape backups as more remote locations came online and the window of available backup time shrank due to time-zone considerations.

Which led Cascade to its latest venture: the deployment of remote management made possible by technology from Seattle-based HyBlue. The offering, called Cascade Computer Maintenance ProPak, keeps tabs on the servers and alerts Cascade if problems are developing, such as a RAID failure. For Hafner, managed services were easy to justify. "We didn't want downtime," he said.

Since introducing the managed service about eight months ago, Cascade has signed eight customers.

Looking ahead, Cascade and Colson and Colson are exploring the potential benefits of deploying Microsoft Terminal Services—something Hafner began discussing with the VAR almost two years ago but at the time wasn't technically feasible.

"There's always been another hill to go over," Kerzel said.

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