Marine Max  

Business Need

"We had a little bit of an issue with our data centers in general. Our data center was here in our corporate offices in Clearwater, Florida, and we happen to be in a level one hurricane evacuation zone--really the first area that gets evacuated during a hurricane--and back about three years ago is when we had that very active storm season in Florida, and it made it a fairly large challenge to keep our systems up and running, keep them cooled, and be able to access the systems when we needed to. We had some systems in place here for redundancy in cooling, but just being able to access the facilities during the period of time that a storm was coming up the coast, or what have you, became a challenge because of building management and those types of situations; we don't actually own the facilities or buildings we're in, so for us to get into the facilities to be able to manage the systems and keep them up and running was a challenge.

So if we had continued along the lines we were going, it would have had a pretty serious impact, not only for the storms we have in Florida that cause loss of access to the facilities themselves but even just during regular periods of time. It became difficult for us to keep up with the cooling and power requirements for our systems as they grew. We have a relatively lean IT staff in general, so it really wasn't one of our core competencies here internally to be able to manage those types of changing requirements for our data center."

Why Qwest

"One is we had some existing services with Qwest, and we were really happy with their existing services, so that made the choice easy. But they also, just even looking at what was offered versus the costs involved, as well, Qwest just had a much better solution. The redundancy was much greater; some of the other local facilities we looked at, they may have had a backup standby generator, but at the data center we're at with Qwest, they have seven generators and multiple redundancy there and multiple redundancy on the cooling side. For the costs themselves, which are pretty similar to the competitors, the facilities were much better. We've just had a really good experience with Qwest in the past through hosting, through our data services we have with Qwest--just an excellent situation, excellent vendor partnership we've got going on."

Customer Service

"Customer service with Qwest has been excellent, and that's one of the reasons we've been with them for so long. We've had a good experience with them as a vendor. We, in our company, are kind of under the mindset that we like to partner with our vendors in the aspect of moving forward, so we don't have the tendency to jump vendors very often; we usually stick with one company that if we're having good success and doing good business with the company and they're really helping us achieve our goals and giving us excellent service, we stick with them for long periods of time--and Qwest has done that well for us.

We actually have managed services through a company out of Massachusetts that watches our individual network, and they'll work directly with Qwest data services when we have any type of circuit outage or any type of facility down. If we have a situation where an extended outage occurs, we'll escalate through the Qwest network operations center, and typically our support team has been excellent. From our sales team, our sales engineer, all the way through the network operations center and any type of escalation we have with our service management team, they're very technically competent and handle all of our issues very well, especially if we have extended outages or anything related to that, to work with the local exchange carriers all the way, to any issues relating to our equipment, to any issues on the Qwest network.

Our experience with Q.Control on my side is actually somewhat limited. I've used it some in the past when I was doing some of the network management more directly myself, but now our network team deals with it more often to check status updates on tickets, to work with our vendors that monitor our circuits--any of those types of situations. Q.Control's an excellent resource to be able to get a quick update on a status of a trouble ticket as it's moving through the system."