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 »
April 4th, 2011
It has been awhile since we’ve written here at IT Technology and Services – but we’re back and ready to impart what wisdom we can! So, you hear a lot about SEO and SEM and Website Marketing these days but really, what does that mean? Here at EBS IT Solutions we specialize in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), so I’ll focus on that pesky little acronym.
Search engine optimization is just what it sounds like – when you are engaged in SEO, you are working to optimize your website and web page content so that it is found and displayed by Google and other search engines, preferably at the top of the search results. The foundation of all search engine optimization (SEO) is the Keyword. When users search the internet, they use a keyword or key phrase. Someone searching “IT services, Houston” for example, is looking for a company that provides IT services. In order to rank well for search terms, you need website content that is keyword-rich. Another important part of SEO, is building backlinks to your site. A “backlink” is when another site has a link to your website. You want to have quality backlinks which can come from any number of avenues – blog posts, tweets, articles, ezines, directories.
The thing about SEO that gets some people is that it really is a process. SEO takes time – yes, for some sites it can even take months. In our world of instantaneous communication this is sometimes hard for people to understand. With search engine optimization, it may take time to build up enough content and backlinks to start seeing results in the search engines – but trust me, once those search engine rankings start climbing up and up, you’ll get glad you invested some time in SEO!
Posted in Web Promotion SEO, Web and Browsers | 2 Comments »
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 »
October 23rd, 2009
“According to research from database firm Drake Direct, Facebook now accounts for 25 percent of Internet page views in the United States.” I stumbled on this reference and it certainly caught my attention! I know my two teenagers spend a ton of time on Facebook and stay in touch with friends and family. I have looked over their shoulders and seen the general drift of it, but I never logged in myself and I don’t have a page. I am thus officially a dinosaur.
Our company, EBS, does have an embryonic Facebook page and inspired by the page view statistic I decided to log in and check it all out. I am doing that as I write. If you are also a dinosaur you find someone’s profile and you see their “wall” – a public listing of comments, feedback, messages. I am looking at the Facebook profile for Amazon.com for example – the comments on their wall are bashing them for carrying a Halloween costume that seems to be inappropriate. One message: “Pull this costume off your website for good!!! Needless to say, I will NEVER again use my Amazon account and will no longer support such an idiotic corporation.”
Ok, for my first toe in the water that is a little unnerving -as a business person! Ok let’s try Starbucks, we find:“ ooooh, mocha…yummy 
” and “starbucks is the best!! im going their tomorrow.” Well that is more encouraging.
Our EBS profile is just our logo and a little information about the company so far. We have made a few Houston business links. I am going to push that we build the profile up some –get more content and links and I will report on what happens we go along. How can the social networking phenomena be utilized for marketing? That is the business question we will discuss some more.
Posted in Social Networking, Web 2.0, Web Promotion SEO, Web and Browsers | No Comments »
October 12th, 2009
After years of Microsoft trying to keep up with Google, they finally made some headway with the release of Bing, Microsoft’s new “decision engine”. Since the release of Bing, Google has released a pre-beta stage of a new Google engine named “Caffeine” . Coincidence? I think not.
It is not Google’s norm to announce an upgrade release; they tend to keep the magic behind the curtains, so why the big announcement this time? Some would say it was to keep the spotlight on Google. Now that Microsoft has come out with a “faster, better Search engine” Google wants to make sure they don’t lose their audience. Google claims not, “Nope. I love competition in search and want lots of it, but this change has been in the works for months. I think the best way for Google to do well in search is to continue what we’ve done for the last decade or so: focus relentlessly on pushing our search quality forward. Nobody cares more about search than Google, and I don’t think we’ll ever stop trying to improve.” [1].
The new version of Google is to be better and faster, we all know Google is fast, how much faster can they make it? Well just about twice as fast! Speed is great and all, but what we all want to know is how is the new Google going to affect our search engine optimization efforts? What ranking, crawling & indexing changes will we see?
The new Google is to include more comprehensive ways of crawling the web and determining PageRank. The main goal is to return more relevant results – faster. According to Google’s Matt Cut the change is “primarily under the hood” [1] Google will still look the same but the bots will be working differently. When the new updated is released the most important words in SEO will “reputable and relevant”!
Google is working hard to get the users what they are looking for faster which means SEO’s will need to work harder to keep up with the race.
A push in favor of reputable can only help our EBS SEO work -we take the high road by helping our clients create rich content that should always be favored by the search engines.
To check out the Caffeine preview yourself you can go to:http://www2.sandbox.google.com/
[1]http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/googleseo/page/4/)
Posted in Web Promotion SEO, Web and Browsers | 2 Comments »
October 12th, 2009
They will ask you to post a code in your blog – to confirm you do in fact control the blog you claim. Like this:
nm5kjswudz
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
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 »
September 25th, 2009
We do web site marketing for a number of clients. In fact, we have seen a nice increase in this business area this year, which makes sense since it is a very cost effective way to find new sales! We graph our client’s website unique visitors per week. The desire to see data graphically comes from my engineering background! The graphs make is easy to see the data trend and to help see any jumps related to actions we have taken with their sites. The graphs also provide a great objective, fully visualized goal – we work hard to keep those graphs moving up! Of course more unique visitors does not necessarily mean more leads or more sales, but there is normally a pretty good correlation. We also try to gather conversion data although that is internal to the client and they do not always share.
We have added a web site strategic analysis to our web site marketing process. By stepping back just a bit and thinking about why the web site is and what it should be doing, we get some more solid direction on where, how and what to market on the site.
Another area we have had good success with is Google local listings. Products and services that are marketed specifically to a local area can be highlighted in the local mapped listings area for metro areas. The same rules apply as the natural listings, but there are some specific additional steps that get these placements for you.
We are exploring more fully the use of this blog for our site and our clients and I will have more updates on ways we are promoting and utilizing the blog for web site marketing.
Posted in Web Promotion SEO, Web and Browsers | No Comments »
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 »
August 21st, 2009
Another acronym – just what the IT world needs, but VDI is with us now. VDI – Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is one type of desktop virtualization. It refers to hosting client virtual machines on a central server and deploying that virtual machine to any appropriate device –a PC, a thin client, a netbook on the road, etc. The other category of desktop virtualization is client-hosted. That model involves having two or more separate environments –as separate virtual machines on one client machine.
VDI is the more generally applicable model for business computing needs. This approach offers at first blush a lot of advantages. Your friendly, all setup as you like it office computing environment can be accessible to you anywhere from a lot of different devices.
Setting up a new desktop would take potentially minutes. Management, maintenance, updating of all of a business’s “desktops” is done centrally and probably more quickly than for separate desktop machine. The whole concept of a desktop PC goes away to some degree.
Cost, time and security advantages make the technology certainly intriguing. One disadvantage is the effort to get setup –without ending up with double the hardware investment. That is you could end up with bigger, more powerful servers and more of them plus be using desktops. A from scratch implementation with thin clients in place of desktops would make more sense.
The big players seems to be VWware and Microsoft. We will be deploying a pilot environment here at EBS and I will report back on our experiences.
Posted in Desktop Issues, Desktop OS, Security, Virtual Servers -VMware | 4 Comments »
