Overview
Blevins, Inc. is one of the nation’s leading wholesale distributors for the manufactured housing industry. The company’s products include heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) equipment, storage sheds and setup materials for home installations. Based in Nashville, Tennessee, Blevins has more than 350 employees located across 14 distribution centers and serving 31 states. The company’s success can be largely attributed to a continued focus on providing superior customer service and quality products for fair prices.
Challenge
To run its IT operations and online store, Blevins has 30 servers, 92 percent of which are virtualized with Microsoft HyperV. The company’s systems and 200 internal users throughout the country are supported by Jim Barber, Information System Manager at Blevins, and two other system administrators.
One of the challenges Blevins’ IT team faced was supporting users and systems during times of performance issues. “Around 2:30 pm every day we would have a system
slowdown that almost brought the company to a standstill. We couldn’t answers questions about why it was so slow, where the problem was occurring or if we could add more RAM, processors or bandwidth to solve the problem. It was really frustrating,” said Jim Barber.
For the company to operate efficiently, the IT team had to figure out what was causing the issue, why it was happening and where it was located.