Grant Mongardi

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Senior Support Engineer
Granter of Wishes

Victim: NAPC Customer in Dallas

Situation: Existing storage network not performing and it’s everyone’s fault but the vendor who supplied it. Client calls NAPC for help!!!

Solution: Grant to the Rescue.

Our client called us on a Friday. They were in trouble. Their existing SAN was not performing as they were told it should. Production was slowing; deadlines being missed. Everyone was on edge, casting blame and denying responsibility, and the vendor’s solutions were not helping at all.

We knew this was a hardware issue but we also knew our client needed help. The NAPC job, as always, is to protect production and keep the customer’s assets safe. So we put Grant on a plane to Dallas. He arrived on Saturday for a long weekend of tuning and diagnosis, working as a go-between for our client and the vendor’s technology expert.

As soon as he got there, Grant cloned the root drive, to ensure all of our client’s assets remained safe during the testing. Sure enough, the technology expert broke the system several times throughout the night. By 4:15 AM, Grant’s cloned root drive was the only viable disk left. As the technology guy reached for it, Grant used his super powers of persuasion. “I’m afraid if you touch that drive, I’ll have to punch you in the face.”

Tittering nervously, the man reached for the drive anyway. Grant repeated his super threat and stopped the man from making a terrible mistake. If he’d destroyed the drive, it would have rendered this production server down for days, while everything was rebuilt, or worse, information could be lost forever.

Finally, with Grant’s help mediating and testing every theory, the vendor admitted that the device could not meet the client’s needs. Grant used his super powers to prove it just wasn’t capable of providing the speed the customer needed. The result: a foiled, incautious partner and another happy NAPC customer.

Robert Sullivan (Sully)

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Applications Manager
Faster Than a Speeding Bullet

Victim: An NAPC client that was just gearing up with Xinet

Situation: They had done everything right but suddenly files were disappearing!

Solution: Sully dives right in.

An NAPC client had successfully integrated Xinet throughout their whole agency. They did a terrific job promoting the new system and workflow improvements to staff, as well as the bright new future it promised for them and their clients. From training sessions to feedback round-tables to get user buy-in, they did everything right.

On the day before the system was to go live, NAPC received an emergency call. “The world is caving in!” The client said. “Files are disappearing off the server! Help!!!!”

The client was located 3 1/2 hours away but Super Sully wasted no time to get there. He immediately delved into troubleshooting, but nothing made sense. At times, files would randomly disappear once they were saved; at other times they would not. Hours of testing resulted in more questions than answers. Sully could find nothing wrong with the system – it all checked out. There was nothing left to test within the server or Xinet! But still, files were disappearing and the client was defeated and desperate. Sully left at 10 PM, but during his 3 1/2 hour drive, he knew there was no way he could leave this client hanging, without answers. So he drove back to the agency for 8 AM the next morning, ready and willing to take the heat from their client if need be.

Sully spent the morning with designers to help identify anything that could even remotely create an issue. Finally, Sully tried something different. The problem was a Photoshop bug and the simple fix was to turn off the “Save File with Preview” option. The agency was thrilled and couldn’t have thanked Sully and NAPC enough for staying with them throughout the crisis, even after they knew the problem wasn’t in the server or Xinet.