Posted by Laura Shafer on Mon, Aug 09, 2010 @ 12:54 PM
For small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), finding the right value added reseller (VAR) can make the difference in making your business run smoothly. Smaller businesses just don't have the resources or the personnel to make all of the IT decisions on their own. It's important to find a channel partner who can do (or already has done) the research for you and help you make decision about the technology that will work best in your business.
So how do you begin choosing a VAR for your business? Tech Target has a great article about the steps you need to take before you make any decisions. They also talked to Greg Schulz, an analyst at Storage IO, who gave some great advice when you seek out a reseller.
"Interview them!" urged Schulz. "That is what you need to do to begin to understand their capabilities. If you were going to hire someone to be on your staff to do design optimization and improve backup you would do the same thing." Furthermore, he advised SMBs to try to meet some of the people who would be involved in delivering services. "The more you plan to rely on a VAR, the more you should want to know them and their people. Their skill sets and ability to provide knowledge transfer are key," he said.
The article lists some specific questions to ask as you make your evaluation. In particular, you'll want to find out what kind of backup software they recommend and if that solution is specifically designed with SMBs in mind.
Posted by Laura Shafer on Fri, May 28, 2010 @ 04:48 PM
Data storage is growing larger all the time. EMC just came out with a report predicting massive increases in the amount of data we’ll be storing in the next 10 years. Forget terabytes and petabytes — even exabytes; think zettabytes. How much is a zettabyte? It’s a trillion gigabytes. It’s enough to make your head ache. Even amid the recession, data growth increased phenomenally. That doesn’t mean we’ll see petabyte hard drives this year, but all this data means that it will happen eventually, and probably sooner rather than later.
So what’s an IT admin to do to manage all of that growth? How can you wrap your brain around that much information, let alone protect all of that data? EMC says that we’ll have 44 times the amount of data we have now in 2020, so ignoring the problem won’t make it disappear.
The best thing you can do is find the most elegant solution possible and enjoy the ride. Now is the time to plan for data explosion and figure out how you’re going to protect all of that information. Not just the information you’re using right now, but the information you’ll be using in five years. Plus, there will come a time a few years down the road when you’ll have to have access again to all your current information. Can you trust that your tape archive will cut it?
ShadowProtect Server 4.0 has a pretty cool feature in it called VirtualBoot™. One of the great uses for VirtualBoot is giving you access to legacy systems and data. Think you don’t have to worry about that? In six years, what operating system will you be using? Will all of the applications you’re currently running run on that system? VirtualBoot will allow you open your ShadowProtect backup image files and boot them into a virtual environment, for quick and easy access to all that data. Plus, it only takes one or two minutes to boot a large server volume, even one that’s a couple of terabytes in size. (Yes, that’s one or two minutes. It isn’t a typo.)
With ShadowProtect backups protecting your data, you won’t have to worry about your data getting out of hand. If you haven’t checked out features like VirtualBoot that are in ShadowProtect 4.0, we have all kinds of product information on the ShadowProtect Server page.
Posted by Glen Thomson on Mon, Jan 25, 2010 @ 11:50 AM
Sean Furman is fishing for a perfect blue fin tuna. When he’s not running his business, STF Consulting, Furman is out on the open water, usually more than 50 miles out in the ocean off the tip of Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Very early in the morning on a recent Tuesday, he and his crew left the dock at Seabright, where he moors his 26-foot boat, Painless, and headed out to sea. They saw much more than tuna.
“There is a lot of life out there. There are dolphins whales everywhere,” says Furman. “They were so friendly, they’d come right up to the boat.”
During fishing season, Furman takes his boat out several times a month. He says he’s even arranged it so the birth of his first child doesn’t upset his fishing schedule. “I planned my child’s birth around fishing,” says Furman. “The baby is due in the off season so there’s no conflict with fishing and I can be 100 % focused on what my wife wants me to do.”
Until the baby arrives, Furman is in search of perfection. “I’m always looking for that trophy fish and I’m looking for trophy customers,” says Furman.
STF Consulting is a managed service provider (MSP) in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, offering IT services to businesses in the central part of the state. STF Consulting oversees approximately 100 servers and 550 workstations in 40 businesses in the area.
Furman says he is always looking for the best tools to round out his MSP offering for customers. He uses solutions like those from Level Platforms to monitor laptops to make sure all systems are “go” as well as the StorageCraft ShadowProtect line of award-winning backup, disaster recovery and migration software to keep his customers’ data available.
“ShadowProtect IT Edition is worth its weight in gold,” says Furman. “We also use ShadowProtect Desktop Edition and ShadowProtect Server Edition to take snapshots of systems every hour.” Furman says his business uses ShadowProtect, not only to backup systems they are managing, but to migrate systems from one type of hardware to brand new hardware.
Because workstations can be tough to rebuild, Furman says that ShadowProtect is an invaluable tool for his business. “ShadowProtect’s Hardware Independent Restore feature is a huge time saver,” he adds. “Multiple vendors help us create one image that we can deploy over and over again.”
Finding ways to save time and money are part of the process of polishing his business.
Furman says his goal isn’t to grow his company into a behemoth. He would rather run a small company and constantly refine STF consulting to make it better. “I have a vision for my company where it is always improving. I am always fine tuning our offering. I ask myself, ‘How can we make it better than ever?’ Building our MSP offering means constant refinement and figuring out how we can get more with less.”
When Furman and his team get a new lead, they spend weeks preparing – sizing up the customer’s needs, their systems and processes, and assessing whether or not the customer is a good fit for STF Consulting. “I tell potential customers that I’m evaluating them while they’re investigating me. I want customers who will accept my methodology, my procedures. If you bring in a customer who is burdensome, it’s going to cost you.”
He also advises other IT consultants to take their time developing what they can offer their customers. “MSPs should take it slowly. Everyone’s in this mad rush to develop a solution and put it out there. Talk to your existing customers. Use them to help you design a solution.”
Customers may not like the analogy, but Furman says fishing and business are very similar: “What I like about business is what I like about fishing. The teamwork. The details.” Just like he works for weeks to prepare for a new customer, Furman works for weeks getting his boat ready, turning it into the perfect machine. Then he puts together the perfect crew to head out on the water to reel in the trophy fish. Adds Furman, “The sense of accomplishment is the same.”
Posted by Glen Thomson on Fri, Nov 13, 2009 @ 03:36 PM
Western Digital is touting
new hard disk drive formatting that will save space. It’s something to
consider as you’re looking at backup storage space. The new feature is
called Advanced Format and Western Digital says it will give you 7-11%
greater capacity on disk drives. Other drive manufacturers are expected
to use Advanced Format to get more out of their hard drives as well.
This technique takes advantage of changes in the
industry in drive sector sizes and consolidates overhead information to
free up additional space for data storage. As a result of Advanced
Format, a 1TB drive could potentially gain more than 100GB in capacity.
Regardless of the type of disk drive you choose, you can backup your
data to that drive using StorageCraft ShadowProtect. ShadowProtect is
disk-based technology that allows you to backup your systems and data
on servers and PCs that are running Windows. With advancements in disk
drives, and with the cost of disk space dropping all the time, backing
up everything in your computing environment has never been easier or
more affordable.
Plus, ShadowProtect backup software is designed so you can set it
and forget it. You can schedule your backups as frequently as every 15
minutes, and schedule ShadowProtect to take full backups once a day or
once a week and incremental backups of just the changes every other
time. The new format techniques will make it easier than ever to ensure
that you won’t run out of disk space for your backups any time soon.