Technology Specialists
Voice
(260) 422-3979
Fax
(260) 422-5775
Street Address
1938 Inwood Drive
Fort Wayne, IN 46815-7111
Shipping/Receiving Address
1924 Inwood Drive
Fort Wayne, IN 46815
You demand performance and reliability – so do we. That is why we sell and service the best computer equipment available for the money – Servers and Workstations from Lenovo, IBM and Hewlett-Packard.
In years past you had two choices – either a "clone" machine custom built to your specifications or a "name-brand" machine designed to fit the majority of the masses.
In the late 80's and early 90's we built and supported our fair share of clone machines, however as technology continued to grow at an ever-increasing rate the product life cycle of clone parts grew shorter and shorter. Eventually it got to the point where individual components would reach the end of their product life and be replaced by the manufacturer with something else, often significantly different, before we could complete hardware and software compatibility tests. This made it impossible to build consistency into our products, since a machine that we sold one month would be built out of different parts than a machine sold the following month. With the inconsistencies we found increased support costs for both our customers and us, and warranty service became a nightmare because you could never depend on having an exact replacement for a part.
We started doing cost-analysis and found that even though a "name-brand" machine may be more expensive, the support costs were actually much less and the total cost of ownership significantly less than clone machines.
We evaluated and field-tested a number of products and eventually switched over to IBM workstations and servers, in 2001, because our testing showed that the products were clearly superior. In 2002 we add the Compaq line which is now Hewlett Packard.
Many clone builders will try to tell you that a tier-one server is proprietary, and that it is hard to get replacement parts. They are only half-right. A real server uses proprietary architectures because it is the ONLY way to engineer in and guarantee reliability. However, getting the proper replacement parts is usually much easier with a tier-one system than a clone system because tier-one manufacturers keep the parts on-hand. We can easily find you a hot-swap hard drive or fan assembly for an IBM server built 7 years ago, but a clone builder is going to be hard-pressed to find a hot-swap hard drive tray for a machine assembled the year before.
Years ago tier-one servers were closed architectures. Today, however, we can customize a tier-one server to a customer's exact needs. You can get the exact mix of case styles, processors, memory, and storage options that you need for your application. You get the advantage of customization while keeping the reliability of a proprietary system.