Avnet Technology Solutions Expands Consolidation Assessment Services for HP Unix Servers

Business Wire, Nov 27, 2007

Avnet's OneTech Consolidation Impact Assessment Consulting Service Helps Partners Target New Server Consolidation Sales Opportunities

PHOENIX -- Avnet Technology Solutions, a value-added distributor of enterprise computing products, embedded subsystems, software and services, and an operating group of Avnet, Inc. (NYSE:AVT), has expanded its OneTech[TM] Consolidation Impact Assessment (CIA) consulting services to support HP UNIX business-critical server environments. Avnet's CIA services help its value-added reseller partners grow their server consolidation practices by providing a proven methodology for industry standard server, storage consolidation, and now Unix server consolidation assessments. CIA services provide both technical and financial analysis of current server and storage environments, and help Avnet's partners provide recommendations for future investments based on anticipated demands and total cost of ownership for the systems.

As a part of the CIA methodology, Avnet collects comprehensive server performance and workload data over several weeks to determine how much processing power and memory is actually being used in an end customer's data center. By understanding the peaks in demand and overall workload requirements, Avnet can create a technical benchmark that forms the foundation for Avnet's partners to architect a complete solution for their customers. Avnet also evaluates the financial aspects of a server environment, focusing on the hard costs model including those that go beyond the actual systems purchase expense, such as power consumption, heating/cooling, system management resources and downtime due to standard maintenance requirements. All of these factors combine to create a total cost of ownership model for Avnet's partners that is based on a standardized accounting framework.

Avnet has been providing CIA services for industry standard servers and storage over the past five years, and has seen double-digit growth rates in HP consolidation since launching the service. Due to increasing demand, Avnet is now expanding its CIA services to support the HP Unix environment. Business-critical server environments are especially challenging to consolidate, because Unix servers typically support back-end applications and databases, and are more heavily utilized across the enterprise. Consolidation requires a true benchmark of the demands on the server, and planning not only for growth, but also for standard server maintenance down time. Under-allocating server resources and requirements could be a costly mistake in mission-critical environments, so customers must be able to accurately estimate current and future infrastructure needs within their IT budget. Avnet's CIA service gives Avnet's partners the confidence to design and recommend Unix server purchases that will provide long-term value for their customers.

Recently, Avnet worked with Illinois-based, value-added reseller partner American Digital to provide CIA services for an HP customer that wanted to purchase new HP Integrity servers to become more efficient and scaleable. In collaboration with America Digital, Avnet generated an assessment that differed from initial recommendations provided by another vendor. Although the recommendation from Avnet and American Digital was for a larger number of servers, the analysis was based on real performance data rather than estimates and took redundancy requirements into consideration. Based on the details in the assessment, American Digital was able to show its customer that the performance metrics on the seemingly lower-cost solution would have addressed their immediate needs, but wouldn't provide redundancy or support maintenance situations. The end customer appreciated the depth of analysis provided by American Digital and agreed with their findings. As a result, American Digital's revenue on the deal was increased by 20 percent, and the company enhanced its role as a trusted advisor to its customer.

"Server consolidation is very important to our customers - especially when we can confidently demonstrate financial payback and prove a solution to them technically," said Ryan Parrish, senior enterprise account manager, American Digital. "Avnet's Consolidation Impact Assessments opened up brand new opportunities for us. They give us a starting point for architecting an HP business-critical server solution for our customers that is based on current, real-world data and accurately predicts future capacity requirements. The financial models that result from the assessments help our customers make business decisions based on both technical and financial data. The difference with Avnet is that they not only give us standard distribution tools such as order management, but they also truly help us improve our sales by bringing resources that target growth opportunities with new and existing customers."

Parrish continued, "In the case of our recent HP Integrity server consolidation project, we engaged with Avnet from the beginning, which made the whole team more successful. It was a difficult sale because we were recommending a more expensive solution that had a longer return on investment than customers typically like to see. Because Avnet performed the consolidation assessment, we had the confidence to recommend a solution to our customer that we knew would equip them for eventual increases in demand and server redundancy requirements. The customer was confident in the validity of the assessment and trusted that the recommended solution would scale their data center for increasing demands within the proposed budget, without putting any mission-critical applications at risk."