Bennett/Porter

Bennett/Porter & Associates is an Oregon MSP serving clients across the Pacific Northwest, with concentrations in manufacturing and hospitality. A small team supports a large client base, which is why Tom Smith, their senior systems administrator, now evaluates backup vendors on service before features. When a manufacturing client lost multiple drives in an array at once and the host went down, Bennett/Porter virtualized the affected systems on their Slide appliance and had the client operational within an hour. Slide support emailed them during that hour, before anyone at Bennett/Porter had contacted them, because the device had been flipped into disaster recovery mode.

More Than the Technology

Bennett/Porter have been through this before. They ran Replay until Dell acquired it. They moved to StorageCraft. Then they spent several years on their most recent BCDR vendor.


That history changed what Tom looks for. The pattern he kept hitting was not that the technology broke. It was that the relationship behind it thinned out, and a small team carrying a lot of clients cannot absorb that.


"As a small team servicing a lot of clients at once, the service and support side is often more important to me than the solution itself, just because I don't have the time to manage every aspect of everything that we're doing."


He first heard about Slide the way MSPs hear about most things, in conversation at XChange and other conferences, specifically around how the support relationship worked. A test box followed. Seeing how quickly it deployed was what turned an evaluation into a decision about the whole fleet.

The Hidden Cost

The drag on Tom's team was administrative rather than technical.


Device changes on the previous platform carried consequences that were hard to predict. A swap could surprise them on billing, or reset a three-year term. Tracking which device sat under which commitment, across a fleet spread over many client sites, became its own job.


"It ended up taking more time than testing restores in a lot of cases."


The contract review itself carried the same tax.


"Having to have multiple people on my team look through every page of a contract before we agree, yeah, we're going to upgrade this device, and find out, oh, we missed something on page 37, section C."

Support Before You Ask

A manufacturing client lost multiple drives in an array simultaneously. The host was gone.


Bennett/Porter virtualized the affected systems on the Slide appliance. The client was running again inside an hour, and Tom is careful about why it took that long.


"That was mostly because we were taking our time to make sure that everything was coming up properly."


He is equally careful about not overselling the recovery itself. It was a couple of VMs, not a site-level catastrophe. What stayed with him was what happened alongside it.


"The most impressive part of that disaster recovery scenario was that Slide support reached out preemptively, because they saw that we had flipped the device into disaster recovery mode, and they were reaching out proactively to see if we needed any kind of help."


That email arrived within the hour. Nobody at Bennett/Porter had filed anything.


The comparison he draws is not about recovery speed. O“If we didn’t run into any issues, I think the time to recovery would probably be about the same.” The difference shows up when a recovery is not clean. He has spent time in a Windows recovery environment hammering at boot sectors after driver conflicts on a transferred VM, and on the old platform, getting an engineer in to help could take days.


"We'd have to be the ones hunting them down to get that fixed, as opposed to having somebody check in almost automatically with, hey, do you need anything?"

The Value Became Real

The part Tom found most useful was downstream of the recovery.


"They've got this magic box in their server room that they pay x amount of dollars for every month, and it's just kind of a thing that exists that nobody really thinks about."


Every business owner has a story about data that did not come back. So when this one came back in an hour, it settled a question that had been abstract until then.


"Basically being able to flip a couple of switches and have them back up and running in a relatively stable way within an hour demonstrates the value that we've been preaching with all of that backup stuff."


It also made the next conversation easier. When that client later needed a larger device and additional services, Bennett/Porter did not have to make the case again.


"That was in their mind as an example of, hey, this worked before. It's worth it. We don't need to stress about making this decision."

A Better Way to Migrate

Bennett/Porter's private data center was the largest piece of the migration. About 120 VMs across three devices.


Rolling out backup across that environment on their previous platform had been a three-month exercise, done in sequential chunks, waiting for each batch to pair, back up and sync offsite before starting the next.


This time a Slide engineer built them a deployment script, so pairing everything was not manual. Base backups completed and data was offsite within one to two weeks.


"That has been a lengthy process, but it has not been a painful one, which is a huge thing."

A Product That Listens

When Bennett/Porter started with Slide about a year ago, the platform did not offer the retention and scheduling granularity their clients' compliance requirements called for. They said so.


The options appeared in the product roughly a month later.


Tom is honest about the limits of what that proves.


"They may have already been planned at that point, but it at least made us feel very special and listened to."


"It at least feels like there's an actual dialogue between the company and the partners, as opposed to the company just going, here's our product. The end."


He contrasts that with sending suggestions into a void and wondering whether anyone reads them.

Trust Without the Friction

One client capped out their 2TB device. Tom ordered a 3TB unit.


On the old model, that meant starting backups from scratch, working through a support process, and finding out afterward what it had done to the contract, because the device was now attached to a different client.


Here the data moved across, and the original device was repurposed for another client.


What he values about that is not the logistics.


"There's a level of trust that we're being looked out for, as opposed to being a product ourselves, in a way."


The same trust shows up in how their device changes get planned. Bennett/Porter have compliance and data retention requirements that make hardware changes a months-out exercise rather than a 30-day one. Their Slide account contact keeps a monthly planning cadence with Tom specifically so those changes are staged in advance.


"So that we are getting things prepared before I suddenly have to call her at 4:45, hey, I need a device tomorrow so that we can meet our requirements."

The Real Differentiator

He describes his own position with some amusement.


"I am apparently an unbranded Slide salesman. At all these MSP conferences, we all sit around the table and talk about the stuff that we're using."


His reasoning is about where the risk actually sits in this category.


"Much like the client has to trust you for your backup solutions, you as the MSP have to trust the backup provider as well."


And he is direct about how he weighs product against relationship, which is not the answer a vendor would script for him.


"I think Slide is probably the best of the technology. But even if everything was the same as far as the technology goes, that support is the real differentiator. Being able to trust that if I need something, somebody will respond in a timely fashion, and I won't be trying to make excuses to a client why their backup didn't work this time after test restores worked for months."