Memphis Aesthetics Practice: Friday Emergency to Monday Morning Operational

Client: Memphis Aesthetics Practice

A Memphis-area aesthetics practice turned to Netcosa for aesthetics practice IT support before they had even signed a contract. They were running dual practice management systems — WinOMS and SoftDent — on two separate virtual machines hosted on a single VMware server. Patient records, appointment scheduling, and billing all ran through that infrastructure. When it worked, the practice ran smoothly. When it didn’t, everything stopped.

Challenge: VMware Server Failure and an Unresponsive IT Provider

The server had been in trouble for years. The operations lead had been rebooting the physical VMware host three times a day to clear lockups — not graceful shutdowns, just hard restarts that bypassed the virtual machines entirely. Two and a half years of dirty crashes had quietly destroyed the server’s SMB file-sharing protocols. The whole system was held together by habit and hope.

On a Friday morning, the hope ran out. SMB failed completely. Both WinOMS and SoftDent were visible on the network but unreachable. Every workstation in the practice was cut off from every record, every schedule, every billing account. The doctors were in the building with patients arriving — and no system to support them.

The practice called their IT provider. No answer. They called again. Nothing. A provider who was supposed to protect the practice during exactly this kind of crisis had gone silent.

They called Netcosa — before they had even signed a contract.

Would your IT provider actually pick up when disaster hits on a Friday? A free IT assessment shows you exactly where your infrastructure is exposed — before you’re the one calling and calling with no answer. Schedule your free assessment or call (901) 306-7575.

Response: Emergency VMware Rebuild in 16 Hours

Joe Pennel, President of Netcosa, drove to the practice within the hour. After a few minutes with the doctor reviewing the situation, he pulled the agreement and got a signature on the spot. Then he got to work.

Joe’s first instinct was to chase the SMB failure on the host. He worked with both WinOMS support and SoftDent support simultaneously — an hour on the phone with each vendor, coordinating two separate EMR teams at the same time to isolate the problem. Then he stopped.

“I thought, ‘Wait a minute, what am I doing? I’m trying to repair an already broken server.’ Their ops lead was rebooting it three times a day with lockups — literally restarting the host, not even worried about the virtuals. All of these dirty crashes over two or three years. I said stop. I can’t do it this way. I’m just putting a bandaid on something that’s already broken.”

— Joe Pennel, President, Netcosa

Joe went back to the doctor. The practice had three hours left in the day and was already down anyway. The proposal: don’t patch it — rebuild it now, correctly, so this never happens again. The doctor agreed.

At noon Friday, the rebuild began. The full scope:

1. Database backup — both WinOMS and SoftDent databases backed up before touching the host
2. Clean OS install — wiped the host and reinstalled the operating system from scratch
3. VMware reinstall — fresh VMware installation, no remnants of the corrupted environment
4. New virtual machines — built both VMs from the ground up; no snapshots from the broken server
5. Database restore — restored both application databases into the clean VMs
6. Vendor coordination — worked with SoftDent and WinOMS support throughout to verify full application functionality
7. Workstation validation — confirmed SMB file sharing across all workstations before leaving

Joe did not leave until 4:00 AM Saturday. The practice was not his scheduled emergency — he was there because they called and he answered.

Outcome: Zero Data Loss and a Monday Morning Reopening

Monday morning, the practice opened. Every patient record intact. Every appointment on the schedule. Every workstation connecting to the server without issues.

That result is what “zero data loss” actually costs to produce: an hour of simultaneous troubleshooting with both EMR vendors, then a full noon-to-4-AM rebuild — a clean OS install, a fresh VMware environment, brand-new virtual machines, and restored databases with no snapshots carried over from two and a half years of dirty crashes. None of it was patched. All of it was rebuilt.

The previous IT provider never called back.

The practice became a long-term Netcosa client. The operations lead, who made that Friday morning call before any contract existed, later moved to a Memphis financial services company — and is now a warm contact in Netcosa’s pipeline. A crisis handled with straight talk and 16 hours of work became a relationship that lasted years and extended into a second industry.

That is what managed IT services from Netcosa looks like when it matters.

Worried your current IT provider won’t answer when it matters most? Talk to Netcosa about emergency IT support for your practice.

Services: Managed IT Services | Backup & Disaster Recovery