Tech Talk: Upgrading an Aging Infrastructure

By Elizabeth Wasserman

Pentel's Information Technology Manager Matthew Staver discusses why his company invested in a more scalable infrastructure.

Pentel, a 60-year-old manufacturer of writing instruments and art materials, had aging technology infrastructure that would sometimes result in IT outages at its U.S. headquarters in Torrance, Calif. The computing platform also was costly to maintain. Matthew Staver, Pentel's information technology manager, tells Inc. Technology Editor Elizabeth Wasserman how the company invested in a more scalable architecture and reduced costs.

Elizabeth Wasserman: Why did you replace your aging infrastructure?

Matthew Staver: We were having issues with failures that would take us down for any number of hours. We were also facing rising maintenance costs. So it was costing us more money to keep this equipment under support from the manufacturers. We decided that we needed some new equipment. We started looking at what technology was out there, where the trends were going, and what seemed to make sense for our company. We had been using an ERP system that was on a Unix system. It was somewhat hard to find people to repair it. We decided to look at a platform that would support Linux. We ended up looking at blade servers from HP and virtualization.

Wasserman: What kind of results have you seen?

Staver: We started out with five racks of equipment in our data center. We've already gotten rid of one whole rack and we're getting ready to get rid of another rack of equipment. When we're done, we'll be down to one rack. From 5 to 1. We're going to see significant power savings because we've turned off so many machines. We don't have all these different servers, of different ages, and different hardware. We have one platform.