Netgain CTO Named in InfoWorld’s CTO 25

Netgain’s  Chief Technology Officer, Scott Baynes, has been named to an elite group – InfoWorld’s CTO 25.  Baynes, a Partner in the Minnesota based technology firm, has held the CTO position since the company’s inception in 2000. Baynes is recognized in the nation’s top 25 CTOs amidst technology leaders from companies such as Verizon Wireless, VeriSign, SyBase, and British Petroleum.

“We’re all very proud of Scott, and appreciative of the innovation and leadership he brings to the company,” said Netgain Founder and CEO, Scott Warzecha. “His technical expertise has brought Netgain from a small, regional service provider, to a nationwide leader in healthcare technology.”

As Chief Technology Officer at Netgain, Baynes works closely with clients to help them leverage technology to create more effective and efficient operations. With an extensive knowledge of datacenter operations and the intricacies of IT, Baynes has become known for his expertise in designing hosting solutions that are tailored to the clients’ needs.
Baynes has created an impressive hosting infrastructure that has become a preferred solution nationwide. He continues to build and maintain strong and stable network architecture and look for opportunities to further enhance Netgain’s hosting services. As a certified Microsoft professional, he uses his knowledge of Microsoft Windows applications and his scientific background to continuously enhance Netgain’s state-of-the-art data center

Each year, the InfoWorld CTO 25 Awards honor senior IT executives who have demonstrated leadership within their companies and in the IT community. Chief technology officers are often the unsung heroes of IT. They may drive new technology development for customer-facing and/or internal use. They may manage and improve the core technology that underpins the business operations. In any case, they translate the promise of technology into business benefit.

Baynes was recognized and nominated by a colleague for his efforts in data center virtualization. The nomination reads:

In the last 18 month as Netgain’s CTO, Scott Baynes has faced several challenges stemming from the rapid growth of the company’s private cloud computing clientele, which is composed largely of private medical groups. The firm’s 300-server data center was quickly approaching N+1 capacity markers, threatening to require significant new investment in a physical plant. Baynes faced a classic technical and business case for server, network, and storage virtualization.

Within his small infrastructure team of four people, Baynes assembled a skunk-works team to vet industry-leading solutions and select a virtualization platform to support the team’s goals of high availability, rapid deployment, centralized management, and financial scalability. Additionally, Baynes won admission into a relatively exclusive club of firms renting virtualization licensure, a novelty at the time, especially for companies of Netgain’s size.

Baynes was able to reduce the physical space needed in its Minnesota data center facility — even though the server count had nearly doubled. The unwelcome need for investment in physical plant was deferred indefinitely and perhaps even eliminated.

But there’s more to the deployment than adopting server virtualization: Implementing server virtualization in a service provider environment was neither straightforward nor well-tested. Existing methodologies for physical-to-virtual migration centered primarily on either single-purpose servers or relied on extensive downtime. Additionally, although comparative performance metrics for virtualization products always trend aggressive, real-world results vary dramatically, as Netgain found in initial efforts.

So Baynes’ team conducted significant load testing, conversion practice runs, and essentially developed a whole new test lab oriented around the long-term project requirements of large-scale conversion to a virtual environment. In practice, Netgain’s use also required development of virtual hosts groups specific to phases of production, as Baynes’ team discovered when moving systems into and out of test, preproduction, and live environments. This conversion activity also took place in a contractual environment in which SLA requirements for performance did not change, so processor, RAM, and other key server metrics had to remain stable (or show improvement) while Baynes worked to eke out economies of scale promised by the technology.

Read about the other reciptients of InfoWorld’s CTO 25 Awards at http://www.infoworld.com/t/leadership/the-best-ctos-2010-618.

About Netgain Netgain is a privately held provider of IT outsourcing solutions. Committed to healthcare IT, Netgain provides application hosting and infrastructure support to relieve the day-to-day burden of information technology operations for healthcare organizations.

Netgain’s accomplished staff has extensive technical expertise in securing sensitive data by deploying a rare combination of process excellence and personal service. In addition, their industry leading, private data center delivers absolute peace of mind through a reliable, accessible, and secure infrastructure.

About InfoWorld Media Group InfoWorld Media Group helps IT Decision Makers choose the right technology, within the context of a cohesive strategy for business impact at their organizations. InfoWorld identifies and promotes emerging technology segments that add unique value for the organizations that implement them, as well as the vendors that provide those solutions. Visit InfoWorld at http://www.infoworld.com.

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