SDTEK.NET Blogs

Google+ exceeds 20 million users, only the beginning..

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 14:43:24 -0700

In just three weeks google+ has an estimated 20 million users

Not since twitter debuted in 2009 have we seen such a spike in user interest. It took twitter almost three months to amass as many users that google+ has in it's first three weeks. Earlier in the week Paul Allen had used his own formula to project the user total around 18 million people. It was confirmed today by comScore that google+ now has over 20 million users. And this is only the tip of the iceburg.

Google+ is competing with social network mogul facebook and with the launch of google+ games, the competition is just getting started. There is no date set for the launch of the games database, but if the first three weeks are any indication of the success google+ is going to have, it looks like they might be giving facebook a run for their money.

Author

Dan Minshew

Apple suiting up against big oppent

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 17:55:47 -0700

Apple files suit against HTC

In 2009 Apple CEO Steve Jobs was quoted as saying,"We've been pushing the state-of-the-art in every facet of design... We've been innovating like crazy for the last few years on this and we've filed for over 200 patents for all of the inventions in iPhone. And we intend to protect them." Earlier this week apple stood firm behind that statement when it filed a lawsuit that alleges HTC infringed some 20 patents related to the iPhone's graphical user interface, underlying architecture and hardware. The worst case scenario for HTC is that the ITC imposes a US ban against all of HTC's android products. This will also have severe implications against all android products on the market, despite who is making those products.

Author

Dan Minshew

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 21:24:56 -0700

Users can now access Google Maps offline!

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 20:16:00 -0700

Download maps before going off the grid

Now users can access Google Maps while traveling through rural areas. Prior to the launch of the new version of this app, users would be lost and uniformed of the route to their destination. Now, all you have to do is download the map before entering an area of bad reception. The new feature should alleviate frustration for those who often frequent spots where there is minimal or no reception.

Author

Dan Minshew

Google Apps cost benefits: ROI Analysis

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 10:46:51 -0700

Measuring the Total Economic Impact of Google Apps

With the economic issues that business face today, realizing cost benefits with their technology investments is paramount. CIOs and CTOs globally are faced with finding cost effective technology solutions that can not only meet the need of their end users, but also help increase productivity, reliability, and scalability. Google Apps has developed a cloud-based messaging and collaboration platform that includes mail, calendaring, IM, as well as Web-based collaborative documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and sites.

In May 2010, Google commissioned Forrester Consulting to examine the total economic impact and expected return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by adopting Google Apps after having managed a traditional on-premise messaging and collaboration environment. The purpose of this study is to provide readers with a framework and analysis to evaluate the potential financial impact of switching from legacy email and productivity solutions to Google Apps.

To accomplish this analysis, Forrester conducted a combination of in-depth executive interviews as well as two broader surveys targeted at both IT and end user groups. This approach allowed Forrester to realize the broad impact Google Apps is having on IT and end user organizations and to supplement this data with an understanding of the underlying factors driving firms to move to a cloud-based messaging and collaboration platform.

The following information is from the Forrester Consulting report (full report can be downloaded here):

Measuring The Total Economic Impact Of Google Apps

A Cross-Industry Survey And Analysis
Project Director: Jon Erickson
Contributor: Emily van Metre
November 2010

Google Apps Drives IT Cost Savings And Key Collaboration Benefits
Our interviews and broader survey around Google Apps and our subsequent financial analysis identified several key takeaways for organizations migrating to a cloud-based messaging and collaboration environment:

Ninety-three percent of respondents saw positive, tangible IT and end user impacts that drove ROI. End users familiar with cloud-based personal email transitioned more smoothly to using Google Apps at work. End user productivity gains were even greater than IT cost savings. End users were able to use Gmail more efficiently than their previous email solution and collaborate more effectively with Google Docs and Google Sites than with traditional office software.

The switch to Google Apps was usually driven by replacing or augmenting an existing email solution. However, Forrester saw a growing number of cases where organizations chose Google Apps for collaboration and then migrated to the messaging platform.

For the representative organization, the three-year results of switching to Google Apps from traditional infrastructure include:

Risk-adjusted ROI of 307%
Risk-adjusted net present value (NPV) of $10,039,612
Payback (break-even) within seven months

Based on our in-depth interviews with IT groups and end users who had migrated to Google Apps as well as a broader survey of 600 IT and end user respondents, Forrester created a representative financial model to aggregate the results. These results are meant to highlight the common cost and benefit impacts of migrating to Google Apps from a previous on-premise IT environment and should be used as a starting point for readers assessing the potential economic impact of Google Apps within their organization. Table 1 illustrates the summary findings.

Actual return on investment will vary by organization. However, the findings contained within the analysis suggest positive tangible returns for the participating organizations.

Benefits. Benefits realized by client organizations included both IT and end-user impacts. The representative organization realized the following benefits that represent those described by the interviewed and surveyed companies:

IT-impact benefits. These included the cost savings resulting from moving an organization’s on-premise messaging and collaboration environment to Google cloud-based architecture.
- Cost savings included reduced spend on licenses and infrastructure.
- Cost savings included reduced IT administrator time spent on system maintenance, upkeep, patching, and upgrades.
  - Organizations noted specific annual cost savings versus their previous environment of between 38% and 56%.

End-user-impact benefits. These included specific end-user benefits around the migration of an organization’s messaging and collaboration environment to Google Apps.
- Messaging-specific benefits. These included productivity gains around email search, spam filtering, archiving, organization of email, as well as improved response time within the messaging environment.
- Collaboration-specific benefits. These included improved efficiency in terms of sharing and editing documents across teams and within teams, the ability to incorporate feedback more quickly, more efficient face-to-face and virtual meetings, as well pushing more timely and relevant information to distributed teams.

Enabled-flexibility benefits. These included the ability to achieve secondary benefits from the initial investment in Google Apps.
- Collaborating with external partners. The ability to improve the efficiency of interacting with external partners and suppliers through Google Docs and Sites.
- Leveraging Google Marketplace. Taking advantage of new process-specific applications from Google Marketplace, further reducing process integration costs.

Costs. The composite organization incurred the following costs:

Google Apps annual license.
Internal implementation and roll-out.
Ongoing routine support.

SDTEK invites you to download and read the full report and see for yourself how Google Apps can help you realize cost savings and increased productivity within your work place!

Author

Joe Allen

Switchvox 5.0 Available Now!

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 10:18:51 -0700

Now with Fixed Mobile Convergence and more!

New Features for Switchvox SMB 5.0:

Enhanced Mobility with Fixed Mobile Convergence for a closer integration between external devices (mobile phones, home phones, etc) and Switchvox.

User Experience Enhancements - Customers will love Switchvox's new, enhanced interface which is very easy-to-use, will not require a lot of re-training to navigate, and presents a better overall user-experience.
Enhanced Reporting & Management Capabilities - Additional queue reports have been added in version 5.0 allowing for network administrators to access more detail and access new reports. Administrators will benefit from easier configuration with the ability to bulk modify extensions; create notes to capture configuration details; and enhancements to system diagnostics.
The Extend API is Enhanced - The new tools and methods implemented in this release will provide developers more flexibility to integrate and customize applications with Switchvox.

Author

Joe Allen

Saving Your Servers from Disaster

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 09:24:20 -0700

SDTEK's Virtualization Solutions

In this blog post we will take a look at some of the key features of virtualization—specifically VMware virtualization solutions—that help defend your datacenter against disaster. Virtualization offers hardware independence—a huge time saver in recovering from a disaster. In addition to this core capability, virtualization provides several other ways to protect your business from server downtime. SDTEK has helped many of its clients to be proactive implementing technology solutions that help ensure their business does not experience any downtime. After all, with organizations streamlining operations and fighting to cut costs, why not shrink your IT footprint, implement a proactive disaster recovery plan, and lower your IT costs?

Disasters come in all shapes and sizes

Disasters that can wreak havoc on your infrastructure include:

Total server failure (for example, local disk failure or motherboard failure).
Pre-failure warning on a shared disk array.
A runaway process on a server that causes high CPU utilization.
An entire datacenter that is hit by a major disaster, like a tornado or fire.

Downtime is a serious risk to businesses of all sizes. Even a minute of downtime on a single server can cost millions in lost revenue. Many companies never recover from a service outage. Fortunately, SDTEK's virtualization solution enables hardware independence that prevents the effects of server downtime caused by any type of disaster in your datacenter. Virtualized servers are entirely encapsulated in a virtual machine and stored as a set of files in shared storage. The source and the target servers can access these files concurrently. The active memory and precise execution state of a virtual machine can then be rapidly transmitted over a high-speed network.

How would virtualization help me?

To illustrate what I mean, consider the following situation. Imagine you have an email server running Microsoft Exchange and providing email services for 500 users, and you suddenly have a serious hardware failure. You find out that it could take over 24 hours to locate and install the parts necessary to repair the server.However, you happen to have an extra server available, but it’s a different model from a different vendor. What would it take to get the email server running on the extra server? With a physical infrastructure, it could take a lot of work over many hours or days, depending on the complexity of the failure. However, if that server was virtualized, you could have it running in minutes. All you would need to do is restore the virtual machine from shared storage to the new host.

In another example of a server hardware failure, let’s say that the same Exchange server was virtualized but the ESX server that it was running on has failed. Fortunately, that Exchange virtual machine was protected by VMware’s new Fault Tolerance (FT). In this case, the end users never even noticed a second of downtime in their mail client. How is that possible with a total server hardware failure? With FT, the system memory of the running Exchange server was sent to another ESX server that provides the secondary version of that Exchange server. Once this is synchronized, all changes made on the primary Exchange server are sent over the wire to the secondary. When that primary ESX server with the Exchange VM failed, the secondary VM just took over. Selfishly you could be amazed by the time saved and headaches prevented to you, as a VMware Admin, but the benefits to the end users and business are far greater.

Pick your flavor

Disasters come in many flavors, and SDTEK's VMware virtualization solutions can help you address them quickly and easily. With VMware vSphere Essentials Plus Edition and the vSphere Acceleration Kits, even smaller IT environments can implement enterprise-class virtualization and disaster recovery solutions, affordably.

Author

Joe Allen

Free Antivirus for Mac Users

Mon, 23 May 2011 00:28:38 -0700

Have you installed Antivirus on your Mac?

Recently I decided to research what options Mac users had for antivirus software. Currently there is not a huge demand for antivirus software from Mac users, but the recent MacDefender malware headache is causing some owners to think twice. Although MacDefender is not a severe threat, the malware is taking advantage of users who have let their guard down due to the notion that "they own a Mac". You can read more about MacDefener issue at AppleInsider.

There are a few companies jumping at the opportunity to gain initial market share in this arena. Here are the three free software options:

Five Steps to Determine When to Virtualize Your Servers

Fri, 13 May 2011 14:36:41 -0700

Five Steps to Virtualize Your Server

Server virtualization isn’t just for big companies. Entry-level virtualization tools are free or low-cost, and there are many benefits to virtualization (including saving money). It’s not a question of “if” you should virtualize your servers; it’s a question of “when.” In this article, I outline five steps you should take to determine when to virtualize your servers.

There are a number of server virtualization solutions available today. However, this article isn’t about which solution to choose. Many virtualization questions are “solution agnostic,” and the question of “when” to virtualize your servers is one of them. So, if you haven’t started using virtualization or you haven’t fully virtualized your IT environment, I recommend the following five steps to determine when you should make that move.

Step 1 – Understand the benefits of going virtual

You don’t want to undertake a virtualization project without understanding why you are making this effort. Most of us have to justify a project like virtualization to a manager, director, VP or CIO. Even if you don’t have to do that, you should be able to answer the “why” question for yourself with an answer that’s more concrete than “because it’s the next big thing.”

Below is a list of reasons why most administrators feel compelled to virtualize their server infrastructure:

Save time – Administering virtualized servers over physical servers can save a huge amount of time.
Save money – Any way you measure it, virtualization comes out as a cost-saving proposition. Dollars are saved in less administrative time, fewer infrastructure requirements and less energy utilization.
Simplify management – Virtualization enables the use of advanced features like resource optimization, high availability and point-in-time snapshots of servers.
Recover from disaster – Having a reliable disaster recovery plan is essential for ensuring business continuity. Virtualization offers hardware independence and decreased recovery time in case of a disaster or failover.

Once you and your management team are convinced that virtualization is the right decision for your company, move on to the next step.

Step 2 – Evaluate a virtualization solution.

There are many virtualization solutions available today. In addition to VMware vSphere 4, you can evaluate Microsoft Hyper-V or Xen/Citrix, to name a few. If you choose to evaluate or analyze all of them, you may be spinning your wheels. To date, VMware has held the dominant position in the virtualization market space, with more than 150,000 customers globally. No one else in the marketplace has come close to matching the maturity, breadth of offerings, reliability, or adoption rate of VMware. Many times, all that the competition can offer is a claim of a lower price tag, but make sure that you’re doing an apples-to-apples cost comparison – more on that later.

When selecting the right virtualization solution for your company, consider the following:

Don’t choose the “newest” or “cheapest” solution just because they are new and seemingly inexpensive.
Look for a solution that has been around for a long period of time to ensure the technology has been tested with a variety of applications.
Look for a solution that has been proven in production IT environments.
Choose a solution that offers flexibility and options to fit the needs of your company.

In my opinion, two solutions meet these criteria. They are VMware ESXi Free Edition and the VMware vSphere platform. The first is available for free and is a good way to start your company on the path toward virtualization. The second product can be evaluated for free and purchased as a low-cost package solution for smaller deployments. While these two solutions each have their own unique fit, they both have been proven by businesses of all sizes over a long period of time and they have the most to offer of any virtualization solution available today.

The only way to truly get comfortable with virtualization is to try it for yourself on your own servers and perform tests in your environment. Download and evaluate any solution before making a purchasing decision.

Step 3 – Determine if applications are going to work well with virtualization.

One of the concerns I have heard from administrators who haven’t virtualized their servers yet is that they believe their applications might not be “virtualization friendly.” While there may be a few cases in which this is true, the numbers of servers that can’t be virtualized are small compared to the vast majority of all servers that can.

In my experience, if you understand the application, the majority of the time, you won’t have any trouble consolidating a physical server into a virtualized environment. I have successfully virtualized

Citrix Server, Exchange 2007 Servers, graphical applications, database servers, and other critical enterprise applications. If you are concerned that your virtual servers won’t offer the performance that your applications demand visit the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace (http://www.vmware. com/appliances/). Virtual appliances are pre-built, preconfigured, ready-to-run enterprise applications packaged with an operating system inside a virtual machine.

Step 4 – Analyze the cost of virtualizing your server infrastructure.

In Step #1, I mentioned that you can save your company money by virtualizing your servers. As most of us work for businesses, and businesses are in the business of maximizing profits, it only makes sense that before undertaking a virtualization project, you should analyze the cost and potential savings (the ROI). For those companies who value ROI, I anticipate that the ROI of virtualization will always be there, but the question may be how long does it take to achieve that ROI? When I get asked that question, I recommend that you calculate your ROI to virtualize your servers, with the VMware ROI calculator. For example, when I used it, it showed that by consolidating and virtualizing 20 physical servers down to 3, you could save $200,000 in server, related hardware and power, cooling and real estate costs and $85,000 in IT staff operating costs over 3 years1. Plus, if you have more physical servers to start with, the cost savings are even greater.

Furthermore, the typical payback period, or amount of time to break even on the investment, for a 20 server consolidation project is 1 month. What other IT projects can you say that about?

Even if you don’t use numbers, I believe that the cost savings of virtualization is obvious.

Virtualization requires:

Fewer servers
Fewer infrastructure costs – cooling, UPS, generator
Less spent on electricity
Less space needed for you IT infrastructure
Less time spent administering servers
Faster response to business needs

If you can install a product that does all those things, it will eventually (and probably very quickly) pay for itself. That’s what I call “a no-brainer.” One point to note about comparing costs among virtualization vendors. Some vendors like Microsoft and Citrix will position their solutions as “free” compared with VMware. We know that no solution that you rely on to stand up your production infrastructure can really be “free.” Those vendors have made their hypervisors free but shifted the cost to their management tools, which are necessary to use when managing a production environment. VMware has introduced a method for comparing “cost per application,” which they position as the true way to measure cost in an apples-to-apples way. I would encourage you to explore that cost comparison further.

Step 5 – Analyze the time & skill needed to virtualize your server infrastructure

I don’t want to minimize the time and skill required to create a virtual environment. Depending on the scope of the project, it could be very quick or it could be a more significant undertaking. If I were to estimate the time to learn about VMware vSphere and consolidate 20 physical servers with “typical” applications onto two or three VMware ESX Servers, it would look like this:

Learn about VMware vSphere – via reading, video training, or a VMware class – 1 week
Install and configure VMware vSphere – 1 day
Perform test server consolidations using VMware Converter– 1 day
Convert all 20 physical servers to virtual servers and consolidate – 3 days

Total time = 2 weeks

Again, this is just a generalization with lots of assumptions made. However, as you can see, being able to learn about virtualization, get your virtual infrastructure installed and configured, and consolidate 20 servers in a matter of 2 weeks is a relatively small investment of time for an effort that yields huge benefits and fast ROI for your company. Keep in mind that VMware ESXi—the company’s free solution that provides basic server optimization functionality—requires even less time. You may even choose to work with a VMware Partner who can assess your requirements and install and configure VMware virtualization software for you.

Make the move when you’re ready

Virtualization isn’t just for big companies anymore. There is no doubt that you should virtualize your servers – it’s simply a matter of when. I believe that the time to virtualize is now, but you should make that call for yourself. Be sure to follow the five steps outlined in this article before you make a purchasing decision.

Author

Joe Allen

Google Launching Chromebook for Business on June 15

Wed, 11 May 2011 23:36:14 -0700

Announced at the Google I/O conference 5/11/2011

I am really excited to hear today that Google's #Chrome OS is finally nearing market. It was announced that on June 15th Google's #Chromebooks will be available via Amazon & Bestbuy for purchase. For those of you #Google apps adopters this could be the ticket for your next business/technology purchase.

Check out the reference links below or click here to find our more information.

Author

Scott Starost