| Enspyre is a company specializing in offering outsourced services like Customer Service, Telemarketing and Virtual Office to small and medium sized enterprises (SME).
Enspyre's success depends on its ability to handle tasks that are critical to the daily operations of their business. To provide this level of service, Enspyre's agents must always be able to access the information about their clients from Enspyre's Administration Management System (AdminSys?). This level of efficient and effective service must also be balanced with the ability to maintaining data security.
Unfortunately, Enspyre's existing single-server storage solution was unable to maintain the storage capacity needed for weekly information updates and overall information storage volumes. It also did not provide for any reliable data backup to ensure for operation stability if disaster would strike. A new solution was needed.
By implementing a Thecus Network Attached Storage (IP Storage Server) device, Enspyre increased its data storage capacity to 500 gigabytes (GB), at cost less than comparable solutions on the market. The Thecus IP Storage Server device was easily integrated into Enspyre's existing network while providing a powerful range of new features.
Enspyre provides small and medium sized businesses with services like Customer Service, Telemarketing and Virtual Office services. Founded in early 2002, Enspyre has seen rapid growth with increasing number of customers. Enspyre answers phone, fax, e-mail and web chat's on behalf of their customers and helps the "callers" with whatever their issues are; service requests, requests for product information or orders needs to be promptly processed. Since most customers are small businesses, the daily volume of communications per customer is not very high. This means that every Business Coordinator (BC) needs to be able to handle a number of customers. A combination of training and the proprietary Administration Management System (AdminSys?) ensures that the BC is able to provide the same high level of service each time every time.
Previous Solution
Previously Enspyre kept all their information on a dedicated PC-server. This PC did not use RAID to mirror data making the company vulnerable to hard drive failure and disasters. [Everyone had to login using passwords to ensure that no one could get access to the data without permission.] Backups were done on an external USB drive that was kept at a secret location. However, because of the sheer amount of data, the backup process took the better part of a day to perform. [This had to be done while no one was accessing the same files. As the company is going to 24-hour 7-days per week service, this system would in effect be impossible to maintain.] So while the old system worked, the growth of the company and an overall awareness of improving all processes required new equipment. The new solution would have to be affordable, easy to maintain and compatible with existing computers and communication systems (phone, fax, e-mail and chat).
Enter Thecus
The answer was a Thecus N4000 Network Attached Storage (IP Storage Server). Says Enspyre President Elias Ek, "We always look for easy to use technology since in the long run that's where the savings are. The fact that the units were also affordable to purchase was of course an extra benefit."
Installation was a breeze. It was as simple as connecting a network cable, inserting the hard drives and turning it on. The unit automatically formats the four drives and it pops up on the network as an available drive. Enspyre chose to install 4 120 GB drives giving them a total of 180GB of storage in a RAID 5 configuration. This means that all data will be saved twice over the 4 drives. If one of the drives would break, since the drives are hot swappable one can simply pull out the broken drive, put in a new drive and the Thecus N4000 will by itself format the drive and re-save the data on the drive so that Enspyre once again have all the data secure on two drives.
"We are very happy with Thecus. Their product has worked exactly as promised, ensuring that we can tell our customers that their data is safe and that our operation will not go down due to drive failure or lack of storage space," says Elias Ek.
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