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The Verse - Volume 26
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Success Story - Torotel
Torotel Products (www.torotelprod.com) specializes in the custom design and manufacture of a wide variety of precision magnetic components, consisting of transformers, inductors, reactors, chokes, filters, common mode, current sense and toroidal coils. Torotel Products has been a key supplier to many Fortune 100 defense and aerospace companies since 1956. Torotel President Herb Sizemore and Versent President Jon Schram have known each other for years, having been in executive development groups together. Torotel had utilized the purple guys since 2004 and became a VersentCheck customer in May of 2006. Last month, Torotel called in to say that their server was down and they couldn’t get on their network. With a network down at a VersentCheck customer, the purple guys sprang into action.
Torotel reported that they could not connect to server resources or to the Internet. Purple guy Kevin Helt called Herb Sizemore at Torotel and had him restart the server, switch, and PIX as part of the troubleshooting process. When that did not resolve the problem, Kevin suspected that the firwall or the switch as the problem. A remote connection to the firewall did not reveal any issues on their internal network. This strengthened the suspicion of a bad switch. The purple guys arrived at Torotel with a spare switch we could swap in to test. Upon examination, the existing switch looked bad (all lights on, no real activity taking place). Coincidentally, Torotel had a spare switch which they thought had gone bad. The purple guys tested it and found it to be working. They took the existing switch out, put the spare one in and the Torotel users were then able to connect to the server and Internet.
Herb was informed of the solution and that we had put into service a switch they thought was bad. As purple guy Kevin Helt reviewed the situation, he commented on some valuable lessons learned. “I think one of the important takeaways in this situation is the importance of communicating with the client as to what the problem was, how it got resolved and what needs to be done ongoing to prevent a recurrence of the problem,” Kevin said. “In this situation, the client called to say the server was down, but after remote troubleshooting we determined that the server was OK but another device was causing the problem.”
Well said and thanks to Kevin and all of the purple team who made use of Torotel’s existing equipment to help keep their costs down and their systems up and running!
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