(Prudent Press Agency)---Accustomed to filling many roles in his law firm, Stephen Kramasrsky, partner in Dewey, Pegno & Kramasrsky law suddenly realized he didn’t want to be the company’s IT guy anymore. It was taking too much of his valuable time. However, network reliability was still a priority. A new case study chronicles how Kramarsky solved both problems with the expertise of eMazzanti Technologies, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and the Windows 7 operating system.

“Time when your computer is down is time that you can’t fully service your client. That problem has virtually gone away,” noted Kramarsky.

The Problem
The firm operated on a variety of client operating systems, including several ver¬sions of the Windows operating system. On the server side, it ran Red Hat Linux. Maintaining this mixed infrastructure was a challenge. As none of the desktop or lap¬top computers was locked down, attorneys could easily go onto the Internet and inadvertently download malicious software that would slow, corrupt, or crash their PCs.

That’s where Kramarsky’s informal second job at the law firm came into play. He had served as the de facto IT guy—setting up PCs, updating them, and troubleshooting them—since he had founded the firm in 1998 with two other attorneys.

“Back then, helping my two partners with their PCs wasn’t a big deal,” Kramarsky recalls. “But as we grew to a 25-person firm, the responsibility became a distraction from my real work.”

Central to the overhaul of the DPK infra¬structure was the replacement of the Red Hat Linux server with Windows Server 2003, which was subsequently upgraded to Windows Server 2008 R2. Kramarsky had been attracted by the Linux no-charge licensing model, but when it came time to reconsider the firm’s server platform, he rejected an expansion of the Linux environment.

“Linux had been a nightmare to keep up-to-date,” he recalls. “And it didn’t offer us the applications we needed as a small business. Linux was not an easy operating system to live with.”

The Solution
The firm took care of its problem by engag¬ing eMazzanti Technologies, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. eMazzanti played a strategic role in helping DPK to design a new IT infrastructure—Windows Server2008 R2 and Windows 7—and then a tactical role in managing that infrastructure on a daily basis with a fixed fee maintenance and support plan, called eCare.

“Having your network crash because of unsupported or incompatible server software is often far more costly than the expected savings of buying a cheaper product,” commented Carl Mazzanti, chief operating officer, eMazzanti Technologies. “In the end, it’s reliability that counts.”

The Benefits
Kramarsky says that he, his partners and associates are thrilled with the new IT infrastructure at DPK. The most widely noticed improvements are the increased stability of the system and the wide avail¬ability of system resources off-site, both of which have led to increased productivity throughout the firm.

For a complete copy of the case study go to: www.emazzanti.net/casestudies.