Computing the technology info at an Inwood business

CSU Industries, a family-owned business based in Inwood, opened up its offices on Hoover Street to an educational and networking and technology seminar for their customers on Monday that included presentations from Microsoft and Hewlett Packard representatives.
Formerly in Cedarhurst, CSU, founded in 1980, is a company that provides technical support to companies and other professional services, and is a reseller of hardware and software has held similar events in hotels in Manhattan and Atlantic City, but brought this one in-house to create a homier environment for their clients.
“We are a customer-oriented company,” said Avram Weissman, CSU’s chief executive officer as he sat in a conference room during the afternoon session of the July 7 event. “We designed our new headquarter for an event like this. It gives our customers a better feel for CSU than a sterile hotel.”
Weissman has worked for his family’s business since 1997 and has served as CEO for the past three. The company is a Women’s Business Council Enterprise certified woman-owned business as Weissman’s mother, Carol, is the president. CSU is also an ISO 9000-certified firm for its high-level of quality standards. Most of the employees live in the Five Towns and surrounding communities such as Far Rockaway.
Beginning in the morning with registration and a light breakfast, there was a presentation from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on storage technology and consolidation. Lunch from 12:30 to 2 p.m. included a technical discussion on new Windows Server features and Hyper-V capability, which allows a host server to be accessed remotely by several guest computers. Each guest computer performs as if they tied directly into the host server.

Richard Canada, of the North Carolina-based company Pharmaceutical Product Development, said he was impressed with the depth of information presented at the seminar. PPD is a global contract research organization that stores information at its Wilmington headquarters, in Kentucky and in Brussels, Belgium.
“There was a lot about the 3PAR storage technology I didn’t understand and that was good because we have information in three different place,” he said following Microsoft’s Steve Rubin’s lunchtime presentation. “The event was really run well and there was a lot of good information,” Canada added.
From 2 to 3:30 p.m., Daniel Donnelly of Hewlett Packard spoke about his company’s BladeSystem covering its infrastructure, what’s new, the best cases to use the system, server consolidation, virtualization and system distribution. “It’s a system we are working and continuing to work on,” Donnelly said prior to speaking. The main thrust of his presentation was “space preservation and overall cost.” “We are running out of real estate and costs keep going up and they aren’t going down,” he said.
For about 45 minutes from 4 p.m. on, an HP networking seminar closed out the day’s events in Inwood. Then a bus took clients to watch the Mets defeat the Braves 4-3 in 11 innings at Citi Field.
The relaxed atmosphere during the seminar extends through a regular workday at CSU as Weissman called it “the Google of the Five Towns” with an open work space with couches to “foster interaction between employees.” The cafeteria is loaded with snacks ranging from fruit to chips, a small refrigerator with a variety of beverages and there is a foosball table.
There was also a hands-on HP 3PAR demonstration for CSU customers at the HP experience in Manhattan on Tuesday. CSU,
infosource@csuindustries.com, plans on hosting seminars in the future.