NSI faced a difficult test at Norwich Free Academy just days before graduation. The IT staff was on a tight deadline trying to complete year-end academic processing when the school's AS400 crashed. Final grades for 2,500 students, and even graduations, were on the line.

“If we didn't respond quickly we would be in trouble,” said John Baldwin, Director of Information Technology at NFA.

The high school had just started its relationship with NSI a few weeks prior to the incident and Baldwin had no idea what to expect when he placed the emergency call.

His NSI Account Executive and a team of technicians swung into action. The hardware issue was diagnosed, replacement parts ordered, and the NSI team worked non-stop from that morning – overnight – into the wee hours of the next day essentially rebuilding and restoring everything from the operating system to application data. “Their responsiveness, perseverance, and knowledge had us up and running again as if nothing had happened,” Baldwin said. “They made us feel like their largest customer, like we meant a lot to them, even though we are a small client.”

The IT staff at NFA then experienced another aspect of NSI, the prevention of such disasters. As previously planned, they purchased a new iSeries server incorporating VMware virtualization software to consolidate from a dozen servers to two…saving money and gaining peace of mind. “If this happens again we can just switch over to another server and be up and running again with minimal downtime,” Baldwin said. “NSI not only saved us, they set us up for the future.”