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Is Your Infrastructure Converged, Integrated or
What?
There is much talk in the tech industry these
days about “converged infrastructure”.
It’s an apt and accurate description for systems that have all the
hardware and software elements of the IT infrastructure – compute, networking,
storage, virtualization - built into one, pre-configured rack-in-a-box and
managed from a central console. Every
big vendor has one.
While the “converged” category of systems was
being pushed to market, there was a little branding war going on behind the
scenes. Cisco, HP, Dell and others were pushing converged infrastructure
offerings, and IBM was pushing “expert, integrated systems”. Their PureSystems
family of offerings was and is as converged as any competing system, except for
one little word : “expert”. IBM PureSystems learn as they process, automating
repetitive management and deployment tasks.
Today, the IBM PureFlex system sits squarely in
the “converged” category, albeit sort of retroactively. In any branding war,
one side will eventually dominate. Today it’s probably safe to say that
“converged” outgunned “expert, integrated”, and IBM has had to follow suit to
avoid being overlooked. As if Big Blue could possibly be “overlooked.”
On average, purveyors of converged infrastructure
systems claim that clients can expect to achieve 20-30 percent improvements in
deployment times, utilization and staff productivity. PureFlex clients are
achieving far better results:
- · Services can be activated in minutes or hours rather than days or weeks,
- · 47 percent reduction in time related to system management
- · Utilization up by 25 percent
- · Reduced downtime by up to 97 percent
Impressive, right? To be fair, there are other
important things to consider when evaluating a converged system. First, as with
any all-one solution, you’re locking into one provider. If you want to modify
the system, your choices will be limited. That is if you can modify the system
at all. As the IT
Green Pages puts it : “The land of Converged
Infrastructure is much more a dictatorship than a democracy. You will
have some choices from a configuration aspect, but nothing close to the choices
you would have going with a piece/part solution.” In other words a
converged infrastructure system is not for those that like to tinker.
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Are You
Ready for Old Man Winter?
Old Man
Winter has arrived and boy is he mad. Hopping mad. “No more Mr. Nice Guy!” he
declared in a recent pummeling of the west with 4 days of solid rain, snow,
high winds, floods, power outages – all the things Old Man Winter is famous
for.
According to AccuWeather, the
northeast and southeast regions will be hit hard in the first quarter. The
Farmers’ Almanac predicts this winter will bring below-normal temperatures for
three-quarters of the nation. Predictions are so dire that the Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) recently released a winter
preparedness guide for U.S. citizens. They did not, however, provide a
similar guide for beleaguered IT managers with Old Man Winter on their minds.
In the IT
department, disaster recovery goes hand-in-hand with high availability. Should
your business be hit with a disaster—bad weather, service outage, or human
error—you want to be able to recover the data that is critical to your
continued operation instantly. In order to do that it must be “highly
available”. According to TechTarget,
high availability refers to a system or
component that is continuously operational for a desirably long length of
time. Availability can
be measured relative to "100% operational" or "never
failing." A widely-held but difficult-to-achieve standard of availability
for a system or product is known as "five 9s" (99.999 percent)
availability.”
For a high availability solution to be
effective, it needs to be incorporated into a bulletproof plan. Essential
elements of your disaster recovery plan should include:
- Data classification or tiering - by classifying your data into tiers of importance, you determine which applications and data get recovered first, second and on down the line to data you can afford to live without. In the process you define the recovery point objective (RPO) and the recovery time objective (RTO) for each tier of data, and the cost of recovery. Lower RPO-RTO = higher cost.
- Replication - redundancy and/or co-location – having the same data in two places at once - is the most basic tenet of all disaster recovery plans.
- Timing - specify how much data you need to recover, and how quickly, in order to get back up and running.
- Testing - you can’t over test a disaster recovery plan; it is the only way to know if your plan will work. Test at least once a quarter; parameters and variables change quickly and what worked today may not work three months from now. TechTarget provides a concise guide to disaster recovery planning should you wish to learn more.
The disaster recovery and high availability
experts at XXX Systems can provide solutions that are ready to scale and can handle any
challenge, on any platform, in any combination of physical, virtual or cloud
servers. They’ll help develop your plan and ensure
you have the right tools to beat back old man winter when he comes knocking.
For a free evaluation, get in touch with XXX Systems.
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When Do-It-Yourself Does More Harm Than Good
Small and medium business owners are a culture
of figure-it-outers. When faced with a complex problem, entrepreneurial types
are apt to rhetorically ask: “How hard can it be?” Often it’s not until we’ve
got parts all over the floor that the real answer occurs to us: it can be
really, really hard. Why do we let ourselves get into such quandaries?
In two words: control and trust.
In a world where commerce can literally come to
a screaming halt when IT systems go down, it seems unnatural to hand control
over to someone else, then trusting they’ll do the right thing. As a recent Information
Week article puts it:
“[Many SMBs] believe that they cannot
truly commit to trusting critical systems to an outside partner…This response
defies logic, however. When faced with a critical operation or process, common
sense dictates that trust is best
placed in the hands of experts. Performing surgery on one’s self doesn’t
alleviate the risk of a procedure going badly! Therefore, the adage, ‘if you
want something done well, do it yourself,’ carries only so far.”
Such sentiments at least partially account for
the huge boom in the Managed Services business. As companies recognize that
managing the IT infrastructure in house can turn into a sinkhole of unforeseen
costs, they’re turning varying levels of control over to Managed Service
Providers. Some of the services MSPs can provide include:
- Off-premise Cloud
Services
- On-site Management
- Proactive Remote
Monitoring
- Desktop Management
- System Health
Checks
The best MSPs will build-to-suit, allowing
businesses to mix, match, and scale services so the solution delivers optimal
ROI and maximum value. And while choosing the right MSP for your business is a
topic for another day, some preliminary situation analysis can be an excellent
way to prepare. According to Forbes,
one approach is to “…take a
step back and build a business architecture diagram that lays out the core
business services that your company offers. Then draw up a reference
architecture that depicts all of the different IT services that are required to
support those business services. Then, identify which of those IT services are
core to your business and build those. Everything else should be outsourced to
managed service providers or to various external services and products.”
This analysis will be a good starting point for
your conversations with MSPs. It’s also a process that a good MSP can
facilitate.
A one-stop shop like XXX can provide such an
assessment and determine which options make the greatest financial sense. You
may decide to sign up for Off-Premise Cloud Services package for one flat,
monthly rate and give up tinkering with IT altogether. The important thing is
to find a solution that fits your business model and lets you determine your
level of IT involvement. Then you can decide whether you want to spend your
time figuring out your IT systems or figuring out how to run a profitable
business.
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Don’t Be
Another Lost Data Sob Story
Everybody has at least one lost data horror story,
individuals and business alike. Whether data is lost to a natural disaster, a
system outage, or human error it can be disastrous. About 40
percent of SMBs
affected by a big disaster never reopen.
In this era of public cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft,
and Google giving away storage in 10 or 15 Gb chunks, apathetic organizations
have run out of excuses for losing data. With the arrival of big winter storms
and other unexpected events, smart
organizations are double-checking their disaster recovery plans to ensure that
they won’t get knocked out of business. However, many SMBs are not backing up their critical data to the cloud or
some other remote site.
Outsourcing Disasters? What a Concept!
Some
companies are now outsourcing backup and recovery services, which are also
referred to as DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service). For businesses that use
their own internal data centers for primary storage, there are a variety of
alternatives for backup and recovery. These services vary between those that
replicate your infrastructure only, leaving recovery up to you, and turnkey
approaches that both protect and recover your data. Regardless of the approach,
every business needs to start with a plan.
When developing your disaster recovery plan, Information
Week suggests these five basic steps:
- Engage with a Managed Services
Provider (MSP). If you already have one, make sure they can support your
backup and recovery requirements.
- Prioritize your web-based
applications according to their importance to your business (also known as “data-tiering”).
- Virtualize your critical
systems in the cloud or at a secure offsite location.
- Ensure that a failure in
your data center will be detected and will redirect users to the backup.
- Test, test, and test
again.
Enlist the Experts
While there are few things you can do to prevent plagues of
locusts, system malfunctions, or human error, there is no shortage of
information to help prepare for them. Articles
describing the various steps you should take to ensure your business has a
robust disaster recovery plan are plentiful.
One of the many services offered by XXX Technologies is
data storage, along with managed backup and recovery for SMBs and large
enterprises alike. Your business may benefit from regular remote backup of your
virtualized data to a public, private, or hybrid cloud for high-performance
tiered storage, live archiving, cloud-based data protection, and recovery. The
storage experts at XXX Technologies will help put together your plan,
implement a solution, run test scenarios, and provide ongoing management.
Contact us to learn how our
storage and data backup solutions can improve your business functions and plan
for the future.
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Five Cloud
Migration Myths Put to Rest
So you’re
thinking about migrating your business IT to the cloud, but you’ve heard that
it can be a risky proposition, especially in Alaska where it seems the Internet
has had connectivity challenges over the past several years. Sure, early
adopters may have run into a few snags, and there are plenty of
do-it-yourselfers out there that have undoubtedly gotten in over their heads.
Many of the
mythical risks of cloud computing are simply ghosts from the past. For example:
1.
Cloud computing isn’t as secure as my in-house data center
Then why are
94 percent of organizations running applications or experimenting with
infrastructure-as-a-service in the cloud? (Rightscale
2014 survey) As IT
Business Edge puts it: “the cloud offers safeguards that traditional
solutions do not. With cloud-based services, additional layers of protection
are not only available – they are a priority for top providers. To succeed in
the cloud market, security is paramount. Vendors know they need to provide
trusted and secure cloud services to their customers.”
2. My
customers are based in Alaska. Local = faster.
The Alaska
Business Monthly points out that “when your customer tries to access your
website, the data request is usually routed Outside where the handoff is made
before being sent back up to Alaska. Then, the data response from your server
heads back down on a second round trip before arriving at your customer’s
computer. This double round trip is made a bajillion times every time you load
a webpage. The irony: by placing your servers in the Lower 48, they could be
twice as fast as having the servers in Alaska.”
3.
Internet connectivity between Alaska and the Lower 48 is unreliable.
There are
four distinct fiber pathways between Alaska and the Pacific Northwest and not a
single point of failure that would affect all four. If one goes down, the next
one picks up the transmission. Plus the state government has mandated more.
Connectivity is reliable now and will only get better.
4. Data
migration is fraught with peril – data is sure to be lost
Whether you
are transitioning all or part of your company’s data, applications and services
from on-site to the cloud,
your provider will be using tools that will seamlessly migrate your data to
their servers. As Business2Community.com
puts it: “If MSPs are good at one thing, it’s planning migrations.”
5. In the
Cloud, I lose control over my enterprise data and my IT infrastructure
Actually,
you’ll gain greater control over your data and your infrastructure when it’s
hosted by an MSP, either in the cloud or on their systems. The only difference
is that somebody else is doing the work on your behalf.
Still have
doubts? The XXX Managed Services team would be happy to assess your
organization’s cloud readiness. You can contact
us here.
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Three Approaches to
Managing Mobile Workforce Technology
One of the more
dramatic shifts in enterprise computing has been the phenomenon known as BYOD
(Bring Your Own Device). On one hand, the fact that employees are willing to
use their own bought and paid for mobile devices to do company business is a
win-win for everybody. On the other hand, now you’ve got employees accessing
the company network from, well…anywhere.
As an article in NetworkWorld
puts it, “The future of end user
computing is here today… and it’s in your pocket. And your house, your office,
and your favorite seat on the 8 a.m. train. It’s wherever you are.”
In other words, if there’s
one key trend that is affecting the workplace, and it’s that the workplace
itself is fast becoming an anachronism. Not only do workers want to be able to
work from wherever, they want to use the devices and the applications of their
choosing. Here is a look at three ways the industry is addressing the IT
challenges of the mobile enterprise.
1. Take Back Control
The control, security, and
data privacy concerns have prompted some companies to provide mobile devices to
their workforce. According to an InformationWeek report:
- The number of companies providing
desktop systems to more than 50% of the workforce has dropped from 68% to
54% in the past three years
- Over the same period, the number of
companies providing iPhones and Android devices to the workforce went from
2% to 20%
- Distribution of thin client Virtual
Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) rose from 4% to 11% (40% have VDI in
production)
- 61% of organizations surveyed now provide technical support for employee owned devices
While company-issued mobile devices may provide
some level of built-in security and control, it is an expensive solution. More
expensive than the costs associated with an office full of PCs? Ostensibly, no.
But it depends on the company.
2. Enter the Personal Cloud
Another trend that is
intended to enable the mobile workforce is the idea of the personal cloud.
According to John
Fanelli from Citrix, a personal cloud can provides secure, instant access
to the apps, data and people necessary to get work done from any device,
anywhere. The model assumes that apps will increasingly be delivered as cloud
services - whether private or public – and procured through enterprise app
stores. In the personal cloud environment, every worker's files and apps are
easy to access, share and secure on any device.
3. The Resource Hub
A third approach, as
discussed by Brian
Grimmage in a NetworkWorld article, involves managing
resources at the point where they are accessed, as opposed to managing the
devices as individual assets operating within a standardized configuration.
Grimmage envisions an enterprise hub that manages the resources users connect
and access regardless of the type of device being used.
At this point, the only universal agreement is that BYOD is
here to stay and that there is no one silver bullet that will satisfy the need
for security and control. How are these trends affecting your organization?
What approach will you take to mitigate the inherent risks of the mobile
workforce?
At XXX, we’re
engaged in related conversations with customers of all sizes from a variety of
industries. Let us help you navigate possible solutions for your growing mobile
workforce.
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