Archive for the ‘Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery’ Category

Hosted Exchange & The Cloud (Ooooh)

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

“The Cloud”.  The newest buzzword with all the hype in the computer and IT world.  In the next couple of posts we’ll be discussing The Cloud – what is it?  Should you use it?  Is it here to stay?  We’ll tell you everything you need to know to be an expert Cloudling – but for now, Hosted Exchange!

We have fewer clients all the time who are using Microsoft Exchange hosted on their own servers. More and more clients are using hosted Exchange with “cloud computing”. A number of our clients are using AppRiver which has been an excellent provider of hosted Exchange services. Now Microsoft is offering hosted Exchange for a lower price than AppRiver.  Also Microsoft is about to release Office 365 a hosted Outlook Exchange, Office and SharePoint cloud computing service bundle.

For $6 per user per month you can get these full services. We will be monitoring these Microsoft services for recommendations to our clients. Windows cloud is a reality.

Posted in Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery, Cloud Computing, Document Management, EBS, Managed IT Services, Microsoft Exchange Server, Virtual Servers -VMware, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Exciting Times for IT!

Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

We’re going to switch gears a little from our last post about SEO (from our very own SEO guru, Alyson) and talk about some of the exciting, new things in the IT services world.  I guess it’s true that the term “exciting” is relative, but to those of us here at IT Technology and Services, Cloud and Virtualization are definitely things to get worked up about!

Cloud and virtualization, SaaS and VMware –terms that were not much more than buzz words for the SMB space have become mainstream. VMware virtualization offers those of us in IT services a whole new tool set of solutions for disaster recovery, in addition to the many savings in hardware utilization and system management.

VMware offers the ESXi hypervisor for free, but just very small investment in the Essentials kit moves the implementation into a new world of vCenter and more powerful recovery tools. The next step up – with Essentials Plus, offers the VMware High Availability (HA) feature and moves a network toward the Holy Grail of instantaneous failover to a standby server. Well at least the Holy Grail if you are a computer geek or if high reliability is important for your business! 

Next time, we’ll go over that mysterious term “The Cloud” – What is it? Why do you need it?  Stay tuned and you’ll find out!

Posted in Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery, Cloud Computing, EBS, Virtual Desktops, Virtual Servers -VMware | 1 Comment »

Offsite Backups

Friday, November 13th, 2009

I met with a prospect yesterday to discuss their IT systems and needs. They backup to a NAS device on site with no offsite backup except quarterly.  This a fairly significant operation with a number of locations and all the data returns to this headquarters office. So one small fire, water damage, theft, vandalism, broken pipe, tornado – hurricane etc. and this organization loses all of their data. It amazes me that folks can so blase’ about their operational data.  There are cost effective approaches to get the data backed up to at least be taken offsite!

There are also some very nice solutions that include fast onsite hard drive to hard drive backup combined with offsite backup and preconfigured server recovery from the backup device. We represent both Zenith and Barracuda solutions in this space.

The Barracuda Backup Service makes three backup copies of an organization’s primary data: one local backup and two offsite data backups to geographically-separate data centers.

Posted in Backup / Archive, Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery | No Comments »

Internet Connection Reliability

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

Is your business basically down when you lose your internet connection?  Our connection was out for a short time this afternon and our work started to grind to a halt. Crucially, our phones are out as well when the connection is down. We quickly forwarded our phones to cell phone lines, but it was still a painful reminder of our dependence on “the connection”.

Barracuda, among others, has a device to ease the pain and provide solid reliability.  Their “Link Balancer” device lets you plug in several internet connections and automatically distributes the load among them. Then, in the event of a failure on one connection the device switches your load to another live connection.  So if say your primary T-1 line goes down you can run on a DSL or cable connection until the T-1 is restored.  You may well have slow connection speeds and may have to curtail some activity, but you will not be dead in the water. You could also have redundant T-1 lines from separate vendors. However, if they run over the same AT&T or other common local carrier you could lose both at the same time – do a little research. It is likely that while one service is down, other types of service will still be functional.

When you have an  Internet link failure, the Barracuda Link Balancer will automatically route your  traffic to another available Internet connection without administrator intervention. The  Link Balancer will then check the offline connection so that you get fast reconnection when Internet service is restored. “By automatically detecting link health and failure, the Barracuda Link Balancer assists administrators by providing a worry-free redundant connectivity to the Internet. ” per Barracuda.

Barracuda has 2,3 and 6 connection devices available.

Seems like one way to have more business peace of mind – for  a price of course!

Posted in Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery | 3 Comments »

VMWare is Cool, or maybe “VMware is Hot”!

Friday, September 11th, 2009

I have done some more studying of VMware and its product line and they certainly seem to have it together in their product offering. It should be noted here that virtualization technology predates VMware and that they have competition in Microsoft Hyper-V, Xensource, Red Hat, etc., but I am going to focus on VMware for now. The basic premise of the technology, for the uninitiated, is virtualization of servers (and desktops, but more on that later) on physical machines. A server running an application on a physical machine is “virtualized”  - that is the software, data, network interface card, RAM, cpu, storage, bios, etc. are all turned into code elements and run as a “virtual machine” on another server that can then hold a number of these virtual machines. The initial driving force of this technology was server consolidation. It is typical to be able to average reducing 15 existing servers to 1 after virtualization. There are obvious hardware savings to doing this as well as energy, maintenance and rack space savings.

Thanks to the wonderful world of competition the basic software tool that allows the virtualization of a server is available for free from both (and not by coincidence) VMware and Microsoft.   This tool is called a hypervisor and the latest VMware hypervisor is ESXi – again,  freely available.

The VMware world has moved way beyond the hypervisor itself – although that technology remains at the core. The main thrust of data center offerings by VMware is around central  management of servers for reliability, energy savings and efficiency of operations. This is where some of the the way cool stuff happens – once you get jaded with 15 or 20 servers running on one box!

The main VMware product is Vsphere which provides centralized management of the virtual servers, running ESXi  or ESX, under its control.  Aside from really efficient central management and control, some of the impressive features available include Vmotion which allows you to migrate a server from one host machine to another on the fly -while the server is running – with no loss of accesibility!  Other modules can monitor the load on a pool of servers and shift operating load so that some servers can be idle while others are fully utilized.  Those servers that are not needed can also be powered down and restarted when needed.

I mentioned virtual desktops earlier and this I think is really exciting technology. “Exciting? ” you might say.  While I am not excited by the average new technical gizmo, major shifts in how we provide computing capabilites to users, huge new markets and technical challenges are at the least very interesting. Running around and maintaining desktop PCs all through a big office is a huge waste of time and the whole PC interaction with its software and other devices is a a mess that as an engineer I have always felt was designed for kids, by kids!  The “VMware View” approach to enterprise desktops, to reduce desktops to virtual machines – basically files on a central server that can be copied, saved, recreated, provisoned for new setups, etc. all in minutes,  is a very powerful paradigm shift.  That the approach is already migrating to smaller environments as well is a given.  Big changes ahead and the change has great promise!

Posted in Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery, Desktop Issues, Hyper V, Virtual Desktops, Virtual Servers -VMware | 1 Comment »

How to reduce IT costs

Monday, July 27th, 2009

An enterprise VAR survey is quoted in the July 2009 INFOSTORE magazine issue on the “biggest opportunities” for customer to “reduce IT costs”. By far the biggest option was “Virtualization” with 49% of respondent mentioning it. The second choice was a surprising one – “data deduplication” – with 18% of respondents listing it. The #3 choice – way down at 4% was the not very innovative, “delay purchases”!
Data deduplication if you haven’t heard about it is an innovative way to reduce storage requirements. At a simple level if you store a 15MB email attachment on your network –there may be 10 or many more copies of that attachment in various mail boxes -all taking up storage space. Data deduplication would mean retaining just one copy with a pointer to that copy where the other copies would be. This concept can be carried down to the data block or bit level. An algorithm can assign a hash number to each string of data and store one data copy and the indexed hash numbers. In this way, your data storage requirement can be greatly reduced. So far, the main application for data deduplication has been in backup software. Note that there are risks –as with any data compression method – so care should be taken in selecting tools to do this job. Big firms with huge data storage requirements are obviously the first targets for the technology.
Virtualization – choice number 1 in this survey – is a money saver even for, and perhaps especially for, firms that are quite small. I say especially for small firms because you can get the first step copy of VMware or Microsoft’s HyperV at no cost. Now if you have one or two servers, virtualization is of no real utility, but when a special application, separate Exchange server, etc. comes along beyond that, virtualization can save costs and add powerful disaster recovery options. Of course the savings really grow as you get into more and more servers.

Posted in Backup / Archive, Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery, Hyper V, Virtual Servers -VMware | 3 Comments »