NHR Helps County Government Save Nearly 80 Percent Annually on Network Maintenance while Dramatically Improving Technical Support Responsiveness
Santa Barbara, Calif. ─ January 26, 2009 ─ Network Hardware Resale (NHR), the leading provider of pre-owned and new networking equipment, today announced that Jefferson County (Wis.) has deployed the company’s bundled equipment procurement and NetSure™ equipment maintenance and support offering to optimize network performance while significantly reducing overall costs.
Situated between two of Wisconsin’s largest metropolitan areas, Jefferson County is a mostly rural enclave of some 90,000 people that is experiencing “big city” growth, due to its location between the state capital of Madison and Milwaukee. Jefferson County’s nine-person IT department is challenged to keep pace with ongoing technology needs for some 840 employees, maintaining two data centers and a 23-mile, fully redundant fiber-optic network backbone that links 11 county buildings and about 750 computers.
Jefferson County ‘s network comprises leading-edge Cisco Catalyst Series 6500 and 3500 switches, 2600 Series routers as well as Cisco CallManager, 7900 Series unified IP phones, Unity voicemail and Security Access Control Server wireless access points.
As its Cisco network aged, however, Jefferson County encountered higher failure rates with existing equipment, which was exacerbated by the dwindling availability of identical replacements.
The IT team was reluctant to buy latest-generation gear as the cost exceeded the county’s budget and a new generation of equipment brought interoperability challenges, along with the need to learn a new version of IOS. Instead, Jefferson County opted to purchase identical-replacement, pre-owned Cisco equipment from NHR—all with a full one-year replacement warranty.
The county’s network challenges also encompassed increasing problems with maintenance coverage provided under Cisco’s SMARTnet program, as the OEM often couldn’t meet the contracted four-hour service level agreement. Rising maintenance costs also became a major concern, prompting Jefferson County to deploy NHR’s NetSure hardware maintenance for all network elements that no longer required firmware or software upgrades.
“We truly appreciate having a bundle of pre-owned equipment and support under one roof,” says Roland Welsch, IT manager for Jefferson County. “Today, with the rising prices of Cisco’s new equipment and our tightened budget, leveraging pre-owned equipment and maintenance from NHR is the only way we can continue to afford Cisco and ensure maximum network uptime.”
Choosing NetSure over SMARTnet reduced Jefferson County’s yearly maintenance costs from $90,000 to $19,000. Beyond the savings, NetSure support has provided a measurable improvement over SMARTnet in terms of responsiveness and overnight equipment replacement.
According to Mike Sheldon, president and CEO for NHR, the company’s bundle of pre-owned equipment and maintenance makes sound fiscal sense. “The opportunity to purchase ‘like-new’ equipment and expedited technical support at savings of up to 90 percent off OEM lists is very appealing,” he says. “NHR customers are able to maintain the highest level of network performance despite ever-increasing budget constraints because we enable them to do more with less.”
Angelique Springer Davis
Network Hardware Resale
805-690-3749
[email protected]
