Success Stories

Seim Johnson Sestak & Quist Partners with AOS to Solve Storage and Virtualization Needs

Located in Omaha, Nebraska, Seim Johnson Sestak & Quist LLP is one of the leading, locally owned accounting and consulting firms in the state. Established in 1975, they provide services to clients in Nebraska, the Midwest, and across the United States. With more than 70 team members, they provide services to individuals, privately owned businesses, nonprofit organizations and clients in several other specialized industries.

Seim Johnson Sestak & Quist (SJSQ) partnered with AOS when they found the need for a new storage array and wished to move to a virtual infrastructure. Their current EMC CX‐400 was out of warranty and could not provide iSCSI and NFS functionality. The virtualization piece was needed to have redundancy in their server infrastructure as well as to help facilitate backup and replicate servers for their future disaster recovery plan.

SJSQ considered EquaLogic and NetAPP products, but it was the AOS team that took the time and helped chart out SJSQ’s needs and determine the best storage array to fit their business. AOS proposed an EMC Celerra NS‐20 to provide multiple connectivity methods (Fiber Channel, iSCSI and NAS ‐ CIFS & NFS) and multiple storage tiers, VMware Virtual Infrastructure (Enterprise) and Vizioncore’s vEssentials Suite provided a virtualization solution that offered the best performance, best versatility and had the most third party applications written to work with it.

The storage and virtualization solution AOS presented has increased efficiency by speeding up file transfers from the NAS blades (CIFS) and has given the agency much more storage space than they previously had. Their healthcare people are more productive in processing insurance data and therefore they are getting more realization on healthcare jobs.

SJSQ’s audit staff has benefitted from the CIFS by the ability to house their CaseWare audit documents for much faster access than from the old Windows shares.

SJSQ is leveraging iSCSI to quickly connect servers to the SAN for file transfers which they found to have a very short learning curve with the help of AOS and EMC. The agency now spends more time servicing clients than trying to figure out the system.

The VMware solution has already saved them money on hardware because they don’t have to purchase the physical boxes in order to provision a server for an application. They expect the VMware solution to continue to save money in the future.

Jim Pomeroy, IT Director noted that “the strengths AOS has are the people, not just the product lines offered. The engineers are very knowledgeable both from a presales and implementation end of a project. They are also very willing to teach you the technology and how to be self‐sufficient. The sales staff did their best to get us the best solution at the best cost for our company. All the upsides and downsides with particular technologies were discussed and we fell that the Account Manger was very proactive in finding out what our needs were and how to best address them.

Jim also added that “all the people we worked with were excellent. We will definitely work with AOS on our future IT initiatives. Overall working with AOS was a very positive decision by our management.”