“Most organizations that use Microsoft Exchange as their corporate communication tool have staff that uses a BlackBerry device as well. Our clients are no different. During each deployment that I work on, I ask the question, “How many BlackBerry users do you have?”  Knowing that the high cost for BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Server) licensing usually leads to sticker shock, I cringed each time.

I recently learned that Research In Motion (RIM), the company that makes BlackBerry products, now offers BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express for free! Having your own dedicated BES server will allow for seamless integration between your Microsoft Exchange environment and BlackBerry mobile devices. This eliminates any delays, outages, and other limitations that are commonly found with shared scenarios or relying on your mobile provider.

The first question I asked when hearing about this new offering was, “What were the limitations?” Great news, the majority of customers that I would work with can get by with the Express edition without a problem.

I called BlackBerry to get more details and they filled me in on only a couple minor limitations. First, there is no support for BlackBerry Mobile Voice System which I was told is rarely used anyways. Also, you’re limited to only 40 IT policies. And finally, you are limited to 75 users in a shared environment but allows for 200+ users in a dedicated server environment. From our experience, it’s best to deploy a BES server in a dedicated environment for optimal performance. So for the clients LogicalSolutions.net will work with won’t be limited to the amount of users able to access the BES server.

For the small cost of a virtual dedicated server, we can install the free BES Express application and have you up and running in no time!"

When it comes time to start thinking about Virtualization, here are 5 important factors to think about:

1. Platform: Which is the most Suitable Platform?

There really are only three major competitors: VMWare, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Parallels Virtuozzo. Each one of these platforms offers Competitive advantages as well as different pricing models.  For Example, running Microsoft Hyper-V allows you to run unlimited Windows Operating Systems under a single License which would lower the license costs for your organization, but might it may not be the best candidate if you are a Linux based organization. 

2. Number of Containers: How many virtual servers can you fit on each Server?

This really depends on the current CPU/RAM usage of your current environments.  One commonly made mistake is overloading the host server with too many Virtual Instances which will cause poor performance. 

3. Domain Controller Placement

Another thing to take into consideration is failover and proper disaster recovery for your Domain Controllers.  Placing your Primary and Secondary DNS server on Separate Virtual Nodes is best practice as well as having enough failover machines to handle the event of a Virtualization Host Failure. 

4. Migration Strategy

Determine a Migration Strategy and evaluate all your current candidate applications to migrate to your virtual environment.  Note that not all applications should be migrated to virtual environments.  For example, some versions of Microsoft Exchange are not supported on select Virtual Platforms.  Doing your homework  is one of the most important step that needs to be taken before moving to a new environment and/or platform.

5. Failover and Backup Plan

Now that you are running more environments on fewer servers, backup and disaster recovery become even more critical.  Setting up a proper backup strategy for all of your Virtual Environments is crucial.  On the disaster recovery side, even if you run your virtual servers in house, you should secure a failover Virtual environment.  At LogicalSolutions.net, we offer failover Virtual Environments that will run your applications in the event of a failure.

Here at LogicalSolutions.net we recently rolled out an update our own mail server to Microsoft Exchange 2010. Exchange 2010 brings with it many new updates and enhancements, especially for you corporate users who may have skipped 2007 and are still on version 2003. One of the largest leaps forward is enhancements made to the Outlook Web App (OWA) feature.  Outlook Web App, or OWA, allows you to access your Exchange 2010 e-mail features from your browser. This helps eliminate the need to be tied to your personal computer configured with Outlook web client.

One major improvement for OWA is the multiple browser support. Previously an Exchange user of OWA would have to use Internet Explorer. In version 2010, OWA is now supported for not only Internet Explorer, but Firefox, Safari and even Chrome.

 

Click the thumbnail above. You can see that OWA is completely functional in the Google Chrome browser.

Another new feature for OWA is the conversation view. The new conversation view allows you to group multiple threads from a single conversation together. This will make your inbox management far more efficient. If you’re a user of Google’s Gmail email system, you’re very familiar with how this works and probably quite excited to see it come to your corporate email system.

Click the thumbnail above for an example of conversation viewing.

A personal favorite new feature of mine is the shared calendar interface in OWA. In previous versions, you had limited accessibility to viewing calendars. Now with 2010, it’s as if you were on your PC working with the Outlook application. You can even enable sharing with people outside your organization allowing for increased collaboration.

 

Click the thumbnail above for a better view of OWA calendar sharing.

Finally, as more and more enterprise organizations are looking to outsource their IT needs, additional features are becoming available to allow this to become easier every day.  In the past you were restricted to access your Exchange application through OWA or connecting via VPN. Now with Outlook Anywhere, you can use Microsoft Outlook 2010, 2007 or 2003 to connect to your Exchange server outside your corporate network without hassle.   Benefits of using Outlook Anywhere allows your users to have remote access to the Exchange servers from the internet while using the same URL and namespace that you use for OWA and ActiveSync. Also, there’s no need to purchase an additional secure certificate either. You can use the same SSL that you use for OWA and ActiveSync.  For additional information on the long list of benefits configuring and managing Outlook Anywhere and Outlook 2010, contact one of our Sales Engineers today.  

What is SAS 70?

The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) developed a set of guidelines for evaluating service organizations. These guidelines are called the “Statement of Auditing Standards Number 70 (SAS 70)”. An independent service auditor provides a detailed assessment of the service organizations’ control objectives and activities. The auditor also prepares an audit report which is called a “SAS 70” report. A SAS 70 report demonstrates that the service organization has implemented effective control objects and activities that are both beneficial to itself and its clients. The SAS 70 report can also aid the service organizations’ clients in completing their own financial audits. In the hosting and co-location industries, the SAS 70 report is important for companies who rely on outsourced hosting and co-location services. The SAS 70 report allows hosting and co-location companies to complete one report for all of their clients to use. LogicalSolutions.net’s description of controls has also been prepared to enable LogicalSolutions.net customers to gain an understanding of LogicalSolutions.net's control activities for purposes of assisting management in their assessment of internal controls over financial reporting in accordance with Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board's (PCAOB) Auditing Standard No. 5 (AS 5). Why is SAS 70 Type II important to our clients? 

There are two levels of a SAS 70 audit.  Type I just states that policies and procedures do exist, although there is no audit to ensure that the organization adheres to these procedures.  When selecting a Data Center, it is important to make sure that their SAS 70 certification is Type II which ensures that they adhere to their procedures.   

Achieving a SAS 70 Type II certification benefits LogicalSolutions.net as well as their co-location and managed services clients. Many of our clients are institutional organizations and publicly traded companies who must comply with security requirements such as “Sarbanex-Oxley”. Those clients can use the audit report for their specific security requirements. If you are interested in obtaining your own SAS 70 Type II certification, call us to discuss the benefits of hosting your servers in our Data Center and the assistance we can offer your organization in becoming SAS 70 certified.

I have been in the data center services industry for about 10 years now and I never get tired of the question…..”which data center is right for me?”.  Well, as many of you know, the answer can be an endless list of marketing blah.  But the real answer is, “what do you need from a data center?”  If your data is mission critical to your business, then the facility you should be looking for needs to be absolutely bullet-proof.  What I mean is you need to make certain that not only is the data center 100% secure and reliable, but also that you are confident the provider you have chosen has taken the necessary steps to provide true Enterprise Class data center services.  As a guide, here are some questions that you need to ask each provider when choosing a data center: 
• Do you own the building the data center is in? (I’ve seen landlords get in the way of operating efficiently)
• How long have you been in business ?(a long  and positive track record means everything)
• Do you have multiple bandwidth providers? (the more diverse providers, the more redundant)
• Do you have multiple generators? (remember, redundancy is the key)
• What type of fire suppression is installed? (remember, “dry pipe/pre-action” means  water…yikes)
• Do you have 24/7 monitoring? (someone always needs to be proactively monitoring for issues)
• Do you have 24/7 support? (Murphy’s law….make sure someone is there to assist at any time)
• What are your plans for growth? (if they are not planning for their future, do they care about yours?)
• Are you SAS70 Certified? (shouldn’t your provider put forth the extra effort/expense to insure operational excellence?)
• Do you allow 24/7 access to the data center? (it’s your stuff, you should be able to get to it when you want)
• How do you charge for power? (metered power is catching on…..pay only for what you use)
• Do you monitor PUE? (if you’re concerned with energy efficiency, shouldn’t your provider be too?)

When I first started in the Data Center Services Industry, I was with an International provider working out of headquarters in NYC.  Man, I thought that was the place to be…..New York City, the most important metropolitan city in the world with the latest and greatest that technology had to offer. Things were going great.  We had a beautiful data center and NYC was overflowing with companies that needed our services.   Customers were lining up at our door….we couldn’t build cabinets fast enough.  The Data Center industry was on cruise control and I was driving it in New York City.    Then came Sept. 11, 2001.  We were located about 10 blocks from the World Trade Center – not that far when you’re talking about city blocks in Manhattan.  The city stopped, nobody was allowed access to our building for weeks.  Yes, the generators kicked on when the power failed, our multiple access providers allowed us to maintain connectivity and our staff did a great job keeping our customers online.  As we all experienced, everything came to a screeching halt after the attacks.  Without downplaying the tragedies of that day, my focus for this message is that although the data center performed exactly as it was supposed to, our customers quickly changed the way they viewed where their data center is located and their disaster recovery plans.

Well, now it’s 2009 and I’m fortunate to continue my career within the Data Center services industry with LogicalSolutions.net.  I followed the lead of a lot of my clients from NYC and moved away from the metro area and headed north to Upstate, NY.  Most of the customers I had in NYC either moved their primary  infrastructure out of the NYC data center and into one located in this region, or setup a DR site in a data center located in this area.  Either way, they quickly discovered that data center services provided in Upstate, NY are not only as good (if not better), but the price is right too.   One of the many things that Upstate has to offer is the climate.  Our climate lends itself very well for data center cooling and power management.  I’m sure you’ve heard that Yahoo has even recognized this and is building their newest data center in Buffalo.  LogicalSolutions.net has built its newest data center in Pittsford, NY – a suburb of Rochester.  With our data center located in this area, we are able to accomplish many things.  One of those is the ability to reduce power costs by utilizing the latest technologies by taking advantage of the cooler climate.  Combined with the ability to provide metered power, we are able to manage power utilization more efficiently which enables us to pass tremendous cost savings on to our customers.  When you are considering data center services, start to consider the Upstate, NY region for the energy efficient processes, robust backbone options, and skilled engineering support.

One of my first engineering professors was pretty old school, having earned his reputation long before the days of computer aided design, finite element analysis and precision engineering.  He was the first one to teach me about the ‘safety factor’ – something that every engineer already knows intuitively: “Take whatever you need to support the load, and triple it”.  If you were tasked with building a bridge that needed to support 200 Tons – build it to support 600 tons!

Over the past few days, I have recently been accused of ‘over-engineering’ another part of the Data Center – our Internet Backbone Providers.  While some Data Centers are comfortable having 2 connections to the backbone of the Internet, the lifeblood of our business – we added our fourth connection this week.  Yes, that is four separate Gigabit connections to four different bandwidth providers, any two of which can support the full capacity of our Data Center.

For 14 years, we have taken the uptime of our data centers and core network very seriously, learning along the way of course, though sparing no expense or effort to offer our clients the best assurance possible that their Data Center would be up to the task at hand.  We have always purchased twice the bandwidth needed by our clients, and will continue to over-engineer and reinvest in the data center to give our clients the piece of mind they need.

I wonder if that professor of 20 years ago had any idea the simple lesson taught would apply in many more ways than just designing mechanical things?

Jonathan Koomey, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory calculated that from 2000 to 2005, the aggregate electricity use by data centers doubled and today Data Centers consume over 1 percent of the world’s total electricity use.  To add fuel to the fire, the number of data centers continues to grow at an alarming rate!  (Hell, even we jumped on the bandwagon in 2008 adding one more data center to the mix)

Data centers are extremely inefficient – with often less than half of all the electricity used being dedicated to actually powering the servers.  So where does the rest of all that electricity go?  While some goes to lighting, and a some more to electrical losses from large batteries and transformers – the majority of that non-compute power goes to cooling.  Monster air conditioners that could make even an Eskimo shiver!

Now, what if someone came to you and asked you to design a data center that used HALF as much energy.  Could you do it?  The answer is actually quite simple and is called Free Data Center Cooling or Outside Ambient Air Cooling.  With servers being built today able to withstand a much broader range of temperatures, there are many climates where it is able to design a data center to use very efficient fans and the air outside to cool the computers, saving upwards of 90% of all that electricity previously used for cooling.  Granted it might not be right for every data center, and it will take some time for the skeptics to become believers – but it is definitely on its way.

While we are proud that we have driven the PUE (Power usage effectiveness) of our current precision cooled data center to a very respectable 1.5, we are already planning on building our next data center using free cooling and will be striving for a PUE of less than 1.1!  Clients will have the option of choosing high-efficiency precision cooled OR ultra-efficient free cooling – either way, we are helping them save money while also being environmentally friendly.

Watch for my upcoming posts where I will be outlining our initial design plans for our next Ultra Green data center that we are designing.  (Of feel free to contact me directly if you are really impatient and can’t wait!)

 

 

I am proud to announce that LogicalSolutions.net has partnered with BackupSpace.com to offer a secure way to back up your important data off-site. BackupSpace is a Simple, Safe and Secure way to backup all your sensitive business and personal data.

To say I am passionate about backups and disaster recovery is an understatement; in 1997 my apartment fell victim to Arson and was destroyed. I lost years of e-mail and files that were on my computer. All my data, backed up on 100MB ZIP disks, was destroyed in the fire as well. It gets better - in 2002 my house in Atlanta flooded and my computer that sat on the floor was engulfed in water and ruined. All of my Digital pictures I had not backed up to DVD were gone. (Ironically, the same house is again underwater in Atlanta's flooding this last month.)

I hope you will share in my lesson learned without having to experience a data disaster on your own. Off-site backups are mandatory to prevent against Natural Disaster, Hard Drive Failure and Data Loss. BackupSpace allows for instant data restore, Nightly Backup notifications, Automated Scheduling, and file versioning. Your data is 256-Bit Encrypted and stored across multiple RAIDed drives in LogicalSolutions.net Enterprise Class Data Center. Try it out for you business or personal files today.

Choices:  A big word in my book.
This is a word that comes into play in your personal and business life.
It is one of those things that my children are sick of hearing. I have told them from a young age that "Life is about choices".
This goes for anything.
Think about it. You go somewhere and leave your car unlocked. Someone breaks in and takes something.
The fault really starts with the choice you made to leave your car unlocked.
This made the person stealing make the choice to prefer your car.

This theory also works when you are at work.
You choose to show up on time and do your job. Maybe you don't. That is your choice. If you don't, then the employer can make their choice to keep you or not. Choices.

This word can really serve as a lifelong lesson for everyone. Your choices in life cause and affect other people's choices. If you make good choices then you would hope others will do the same.

I believe that serving clients uses the same theory. As Director of IT at Logicalsolutions.net, I choose to provide the best service to our clients. This is done by making these choices:

To always answer the phone.
To always try and solve the issue the client has quickly.
To provide the best solution to the client.
To go the extra mile whenever we can.

I make these choices everyday.
Hopefully my choices empower people to pick LogicalSolutions.net for your total Web solution provider.