How UPTIME Manages IT for Patella Woodworking
Patella Woodworking has been an UPTIME IT customer since 2011. UPTIME is the company’s IT organization, not a number it calls when something breaks.
Roughly 100 people work at Patella. Underneath them sits an environment with virtualization clusters, shared storage, terminal servers, business applications and a fully redundant network. UPTIME is responsible for all of it, from the laptop on somebody’s desk down to the storage the work actually lives on.
That second half is the part people underestimate. A company of this size can end up needing infrastructure that would not look out of place at an organization several times larger, without wanting to hire an IT department to match.
- Customer
- Patella Woodworking
- Industry
- Architectural woodwork
- Location
- Passaic, New Jersey
- Customer since
- 2011
- Employees supported
- Approximately 100
- Service model
- Fully managed IT
A Hundred People, and Infrastructure to Match
There is a size of company where IT gets awkward. Too big to run on a handful of laptops and a cloud subscription. Not big enough to justify a full internal IT department with a virtualization specialist, a storage specialist, a network specialist and someone to answer the phone when a printer stops working.
Patella sits in that range. The business depends on systems that have to be designed, maintained and recovered properly. It also depends on roughly 100 people being able to get on with their day.
The choice is usually framed as build an IT department or outsource the helpdesk. Patella did neither. UPTIME is the IT department, and that includes the infrastructure, not just the people using it.
One Team, Top to Bottom
Most IT arrangements split somewhere. A managed services provider takes the users and the endpoints. A separate consultant owns the servers. Somebody else looks after the network. Each of them is competent inside their own boundary, and the problems that matter tend to live in between.
At Patella there is no boundary to fall into. The same organization answers for the employee who cannot open a file, the terminal server they were trying to open it on, the virtualization host running that server, and the storage holding the file. When something is wrong, there is no round of calls to work out whose problem it is.
This is what fully managed IT is supposed to mean, and it is the difference between a vendor and an IT organization.
The People Side
Most of what a managed IT relationship consists of day to day is not architecture. It is somebody’s machine refusing to connect, a new hire who needs to be set up, a departing employee whose access has to come off cleanly, an application behaving differently than it did yesterday.
UPTIME handles employee support and endpoint management for Patella’s staff. The helpdesk is staffed from 9 AM to 5 PM Eastern, and people reach it directly rather than through a queue that routes them somewhere else.
What makes that work over this many years is not a promise about response minutes. It is that the person picking up already knows the environment, knows what changed last month, and knows which systems matter to which part of the shop floor and the office.
The Infrastructure Underneath
The other half of the engagement is the environment those employees depend on. It is a real on-premises estate, and UPTIME manages and supports it as part of the same relationship.
Virtualization
VMware ESXi clusters and Microsoft Hyper-V, both managed and supported by UPTIME as part of the environment.
Storage
NetApp storage sitting behind the virtualized workloads and the data the business runs on.
Terminal servers and business applications
Terminal servers and Sage servers, supported as part of the managed environment rather than treated as somebody else’s application problem.
Network and replication
A fully redundant network configuration, plus offsite replication of the environment.
These are the technologies in the environment. UPTIME does not publish version numbers, capacities, host counts or vendor detail for customer environments.
What UPTIME Is Responsible For
An easier way to see the scope is as a set of layers. Every one of them is UPTIME’s responsibility, and every one of them has to work for the person at the top to get anything done.
This is an executive view of the layers UPTIME manages, not a network diagram. It is meant to show where responsibility sits, not how anything is wired.
Redundancy and Replication, Described Honestly
Patella’s network is configured for full redundancy, and offsite replication is part of the environment. Both are there for the same reason: so that a bad day is a bad day rather than a stopped business.
We are not going to dress that up into claims we cannot stand behind. Redundant does not mean nothing can ever fail, and having replication is not the same as a rehearsed recovery plan with numbers attached to it. What it does mean is that the environment was built with failure in mind, by the same organization that has to answer for it when something goes wrong.
Resilience and security are not separate projects here. They are properties of an environment one team is accountable for.
Why Fully Managed Works for a Company This Size
Patella gets virtualization, storage, network and helpdesk skills without having to find, pay and retain four different people.
The knowledge sits with an organization rather than with one employee who might leave.
Users, applications, servers, storage and network all lead back to the same team.
IT You Can Rely On. People You Can Reach. That is the whole proposition, and at Patella it applies to both halves of the environment.
Since 2011
Patella has been with UPTIME since 2011. In that time the hardware has turned over, the way people work has changed, and what counts as adequate security has moved considerably. The technology partner has not changed.
A company does not keep an IT provider for that long by accident. Staying is a decision, made again every year.
It is worth saying what this case study is and is not next to our other long-term managed customers. Our work with Gaia Real Estate is also a long-running fully managed relationship, but it is a different environment: distributed offices with infrastructure hosted in UPTIME’s colocation. Patella is the on-premises version of the same responsibility.
The Customer Perspective
Scott Glickman is the customer contact for this case study, and Patella has approved being named here.
The most useful thing to point at is the length of the relationship and the range of what Patella has handed over, rather than anything UPTIME could write on a customer’s behalf.
Related
Do You Have Infrastructure and No IT Department?
If your company runs real servers, storage and network equipment but does not want to build an internal IT team around them, that is the arrangement we are describing here.
Tell us what your environment looks like today and what you are worried about, and we will tell you plainly what we would take on.
Talk to Our IT Team