Category: cost-savings
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Cloud for Small Business – Hot or Not? Redux (UPDATE 2/24/14)
Google Apps. Microsoft Office 365. What are they and why do we care? Interesting questions. What does every modern office need? A productivity suite to create and edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations. A messaging system, for sending email and enabling chat. A calendaring system, to facilitate time management and shared scheduling. A collaboration system, to…
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“Badges? We don’t need no steenking badges!”
All too often I’ve encountered a certain type of person in an enterprise, business or personal setting who questions the need for a secure network environment. Actually the word “questions” is too weak; this type of person actively opposes network security measures. And very often they’re in a decision-making position for their organization. One otherwise…
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Cloud for Small Business – Hot nor Not?
Last week I offered Rodney Roger’s perspective on the place of cloud computing in the enterprise. His premise, with which I completely agree, is that current “enterprise” cloud offerings lack the breadth and depth of on-premise systems. To paraphrase him, Salesforce and Workday are not ERP. He’s absolutely right. He also points to emerging cloud…
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Cloud: sexy – Enterprise: not so much
I read this article several weeks ago. I’ve pondered it. I’ve read it over again. Here’s a quote: If you unnaturally extend or generalize cloud solutions to me, or if you pontificate cloud idealisms without providing tangible platforms that can service what I am, then you waste my time. When you waste my time, I…
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Harpooning the whale
One data set, two locations – each with an EMC VNXe array. Big giant file sets. How do engineers in the US and Mexico share 3D models quickly and seamlessly? We receive engineering drawings and models from our customers. We comb through the files extracting bill-of-materials information, critical dimensions and other vital attributes. A single…
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What happened?
Lots. Lots of changes in the last six months, and it’s been hard to keep up. But as you can see from the pics, our IT lab and server room are no more. 160 dedicated amps of power, 3.5 tons of dedicated air conditioning. Backboards on three walls, four NetShelter racks, cable ladder. Nice…
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May I Exchange this for another, please?
We detoured briefly into a live ERP implementation. It’s moving forward, hiccups and all. Many of our users are beginning to understand the power of our new system. With great power comes great responsiblity – er, I mean major configuration pain. So we’re learning the ins-and-outs of QAD. I started this journey with the intent…
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Crossing bridges
Back to our story (finally!). I’ve talked about our transition from VMware to Hyper-V. It’s still working well for us, no regrets there. I mentioned we dropped Symantec Client Security for Vipre Enterprise – that’s also been a good choice. So what’s left to simplify? Hmm … communications between our US facility and our México…
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Into Microsoft’s warm embrace
What’s an IT manager to do? That was the question I asked myself when contemplating VMware, Microsoft server and hardware maintenance renewals. At the time, VMware represented the best-performing and best-supported virtualization platform on the market. Our interest in server virtualization was not really about consolidation. Rather, our focus was disaster recovery. The ability to…
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Getting my hands dirty
In my first post I promised to dribble out our “simple IT” story a few bits at a time. October 2008 begins with me in my new role as “one man IT” for our formerly burgeoning enterprise. What was the IT landscape? In the server room we were 80% into our migration from discrete servers…