PC Blades Enable Parking Lot Paradise

PC blades might have the best name recognition in isolated industry segments such as government, medicine, and financial services — but that’s changing. If you look past simple industry classifications and instead look at business priorities, blades start making sense for a whole range of companies.

For example, say you’re concerned about high availability, particularly as it applies to customer service. You want to keep downtime to an absolute minimum for a number of reasons, but mainly because you don’t want to keep people — specifically, your customers — waiting. It doesn’t really matter what your customers are waiting for: whether it’s waiting for a Web page to load, waiting for a person to answer the phone, or waiting to leave a parking lot, you want that wait to be as short as possible.

It’s that last concern that drove National Car Parks, a UK-based car park operator, to centralize its systems on PC blades.

Neil Robson, the technology director for NCP, told ZDNet UK that the move “provides NCP with a highly adaptable computing solution that gives us 100 percent systems availability and significantly simplified IT management.”

Previously, the company had seven satellite centers around the UK; those have now been centralized in one location in Croydon. Security, payment, and customer services operations extending to over 600 car parks now run out of this location. Robson commented that “NCP’s customers expect the highest level of service, so any IT failure for us is totally unacceptable.”

Chances of downtime are significantly reduced, now that personnel can simply switch over to a redundant blade using Sentral software in the event of failure. This in turn means that the company can respond quickly to more customer service inquiries, resolving payment and other issues on site in real time.

For NCP, customer service is a two-way street. They insist on providing it for their own customers, and they insist on getting it from their technology partners. That, according to ZDNet UK, is why they chose a ClearCube solution over competitors like HP. “ClearCube is smaller and we can get a more personal service because of that,” Robson said. “We like to be a big fish in a smaller pond. We get very good service from them.”