Our Employees Share How They’re Thankful

As we wish each and every one of you a Happy Thanksgiving, we wanted to share the many different reasons that our CTG team members are thankful this year:

Grace SunDance, administrative assistant:

“I am thankful for the amazing opportunity that Convergent Technologies Group has given me, and everything that they continue to give. I am also very thankful for my two compassionate, loving, and caring beagles, Odie and Cabella.”

Jeff Joyner, network architect:

“I'm thankful for my wonderful family and having a passion for my chosen vocation.”

Scott Haizlip, SMB account manager

 “I am thankful for my beautiful fiancé, Christi, our golden retriever, Ranger, and for all of the help and opportunities CTG has given me.”

Chastity Loving, purchasing manager

“I’m thankful for my two children and for loving everything in and about my life.”

Alexandra Suder, marketing director:

“I’m thankful for my mother and father, my two sisters, Julz and Camille, my brother-in-law, Tom, and my boyfriend, Kevin. I am so thankful for our pets, Maverick and Malo, and for each and every one of my guardian angels (furry or not) watching and protecting me. I am so thankful for CTG and for the intelligent and amazing people I work with. I’m thankful for being excited to go to work every day and for loving my job. I’m thankful for all of my friends and family – close or far, new, old or rekindled – because their positivity, support, generosity and kindness has shaped me and helped me discover who I am, which has allowed me to better myself.”

Brandon Samuel, assistant manager:

“I’m thankful for the growth and relationships that I have built while at CTG, as well as the flexibility and personal understanding that CTG provides.”

John Monahan, co-founder:

“I am thankful for my staff, and all their hard work. I am thankful for the year that CTG has had and our accomplishments. I am thankful for my family!”

Jeff Garell, co-founder:

“I'm thankful for the many opportunities I have been afforded in my life and those that gave them to me.

“I'm thankful to be living in a country that offers the ability to take your life in any direction and to any height (or depth) you choose.

“I'm thankful for the generations and generations of brave men and women who have given us the ability to make those choices.

“I'm thankful for the rights that give everyone the voice to say what they want and for me to choose whether to agree or not.

“I'm thankful for everyone I've ever worked with and the examples, good or bad, I've witnessed and learned from.

“I'm enormously thankful to have two beautiful, intelligent and caring daughters that have changed my life so dramatically for the better. They have plumbed the depths of my heart further than I ever thought possible.

“And most importantly, I'm thankful for my wife without whom I would be a much lesser man.  Who showed me that the third time really is the charm.”

Solutions Lab Lets You See IT in Action

By Jeff Garell

Nearly every new technology acquisition is surrounded by unanswered questions, hopeful expectations and more than a little nervous concern before the purchase order is signed. Will this perform the way my sales guy says it will? Is this a gamble? How much will this change our operational processes? Should I update my resume just in case?

Yeah, I've been on both sides of that thought process in the past 33 years, first as the purchaser and now as the provider and consultant. There is a lot of gut-check that happens on that road depending on the scope of the change, the criticality or newness of the service needed, or sometimes just the dollars involved. We all have customers and don't want to let them down.

For these reasons and many more, CTG has been building up an infrastructure that will hopefully ease some of these concerns about potential RGEs (Resume-Generating Events).

Currently in our Solutions Lab, we have a variety of gear that lets us either demonstrate the potential and advantages of various tech or configure and use to mirror your planned infrastructure. The Solutions Lab currently houses the following “toys:”

• C7000 Bladesystem with 10 Blades and VirtualConnect 20/40 Modules 
• HP StoreServ 7200 with both 10GB iSCSI and FiberChannel connects (currently FlatSAN connected to the C7000). The StoreServ has 2 tiers of storage, FastClass (10k SAS) and NearLine (7.2k SAS).
• HP 5900 Core Switch with 48 10GB ports and 2x40GB ports that each connect to the StoreServ and to the BladeSystem for some pretty blazing throughput.
• Proliant DL360p with 3TB of internal disk and 196GB RAM. We often use this for onsite Proof of Concept (PoC) when you want to keep your information at your own site. These PoC are generally function-based more than performance-based. 
• OneView/IMC gives us the management and monitoring we need to keep things humming along smoothly.

This setup has allowed us to not only quickly reconfigure for a variety of customer challenges but also keeps us proficient on the platforms we stand behind. This has served us well for several years, but the times they are a-changing.

The current trends regarding the expansion of cloud adoption includes the growing understanding that often the cloud is really just another resource and may not be the full solution for everyone. The things we all like about cloud-based infrastructure is that we can shortcut the acquisition process by simply logging in to a portal and clicking a few buttons. A few minutes later we have a server spun up. I'll save the economics and potential lock-in conversation for another post, but I will stipulate that the speed and efficiency in firing up infrastructure is incredibly enticing. Thus the hybrid cloud is born.

With that in mind, we have begun the process of retooling our Solutions Lab. (You were wondering when I was gonna get back to this topic, weren't you?) We're adding several components listed below, but we will be augmenting the infrastructure with HP's Helion products that will include an OpenStack based set of services, Cloud Service Automation/Operations Orchestration (for that nice clickety-click spin up a server feel), as well as Eucalyptus that will allow us to seamlessly move workloads back and forth from our infrastructure to Amazon Web Services and back. The "and back" is what makes Eucalyptus full of awesome. Of course, we'll have accounts setup at both Amazon and Microsoft's Azure in order to demonstrate the hybrid-cloudiness.

In addition to being able to demonstrate hybrid-cloud and automation capabilities, the new setup will let us prepare for your demo workloads even faster. To facilitate this, we will be augmenting our lab with:

• HP StoreServ 8000 series - All Flash Array
• HP CS-250 Converged System
• Dual HP 16GB Fiber Channel Switches
• A pile of HP Helion Software
• HP Aruba Wireless

We'll also have the ability to demonstrate HP Catalyst, StoreOnce (Virtual Appliance), Veeam, and a variety of Fortinet products both physical and virtual.

So to sum up, we're working hard to reduce the stress, uncertainty and general guesswork that comes with any of these strategic technology changes we all get to shepherd. I'll continue to provide updates as we get the gear and integrate it into our Solutions Lab. If you see anything I've missed or that you would be interested in seeing, just drop me a line at jgarell@ctgva.com.

Jeff Garell is a co-founder of Convergent Technologies Group.

Celebrating Our Milestone 10th Anniversary

By Jeff Garell

Flash back 10 years ago, and I remember the fledgling days of our business that we first operated out of my basement, which was lovingly referred to as The Bunker. I was living in an 80-year-old house in Richmond Museum District, and if you've ever seen a movie where London is getting bombed and everyone hides in the underground, it was kind of like that. Pretty dark, a little cold in the winter and a little warm in the summer.

When John and I finally moved into “real offices,” it felt like our business was growing up. Of course, like most people's first apartments, our home for the business was not in a glamorous part of town. In fact, our neighbors in adjacent buildings included a parole office and methadone clinic.

We had a very conservative growth and spending plan in that we wouldn’t take on debt just to build quickly. We saw far too many in our industry spend themselves into bankruptcy. Besides just not wanting to lose the company, we feel an absolute obligation to our employees and can proudly say in 10 years we’ve never had to lay someone off, reduce pay or downsize because of financial difficulty.

Since that first office, we've moved a few more times – always to a little better location with a little more room for our growing number of employees. We landed at our current location about five years ago and just recently expanded to nearly double our existing space. 

We can look back fondly at the challenges and the risks and the excitement that comes from being in startup mode. But I assure you there were times that we wondered if we would make it, if we would be working for someone else again, if we could afford to add a much-needed employee, and if we would ever get a full night’s sleep again.

As we celebrate our 10^th anniversary this month, we wanted to share some important ingredients in our success.

We’ve developed a core network for our business.

We’ve had a lot of help and guidance along the way from our distributors and manufacturers as we navigated the rocky shoals of our growth. For that, we’ll always indebted and grateful to them. 

We’ve continued to invest in our knowledge.

Without question, this is an ever-changing industry. When we opened our doors, we were guiding our clients through windows-based solutions and hardwired networks; today, we’re in cloud discussions and looking at more creative ways to increase security for those businesses. We’ve grown with those partners and we’ve earned a competitive edge by staying at the leading edge, so we can deliver the best.

We’ve proven ourselves with our customers.

I can't say enough about our customers, many of whom have trusted us for more than the 10 years CTG has been in business. Without them, we most certainly wouldn’t have made it to this milestone. We will continue to earn your trust as we all move forward into the future.

We’ve built a solid team that delivers every day.

I can't even begin to adequately thank and recognize our amazing employees, who bring our vision to life everyday in their work with our clients. Many of our people have been with us for more than five years, with several reaching the eight- and nine-year mark. Without question, they are our not-so-secret weapon in this first 10-year run, and we are grateful for having the opportunity to work with each and every one.

We’re ready for the next 10 years.

As we look to the future, we will continue to offer what we hope are the best solutions, services and support to help our customers continue their own growth story. I can assure you that we revel in our customers’ successes more than our own, because that demonstrates that we are delivering value with our IT leadership and work. Thank you all for your part in helping us reach this milestone.

Jeff Garell is a co-founder of Convergent Technologies Group.