Double Your Data, Double Your Confidence

We've recently added a second data center in Salt Lake City to supplement the one we already operate in Denver. In addition to doubling our capacity for remote hosting and offsite data storage, this new colocation facility lets us offer an extra layer of disaster preparedness to our clients for whom a single backup just isn't enough. In fact, Xantrion senior consultant Brian Taylor has already set that up for one of our clients, a financial services firm that wanted to be absolutely certain it could continue to operate.

Taylor spent a week in our Oakland offices setting up and testing all the hardware and software destined for the new data center and working with vendors to create a secure Internet connection between Salt Lake City and Denver. Then he and operations manager Nick Hensley installed the new equipment in Salt Lake City, with help from operations manager Christian Kelly.

"After that, replicating the client's data from Denver to Salt Lake City only took a week or so," Taylor says. "All I had to do was set up the software that compresses and copies the data, then make sure it continued to update incrementally after the initial full replication.

The financial services firm now has identical copies of its mail, file, and terminal servers, as well as all of its critical data, in two locations. Each is set to fail over to the other in the unlikely event of a significant outage at either data center. And Taylor, who's now helped to plan and set up both remote data centers, is ready to duplicate the process for any other Xantrion client that needs to keep functioning in even the worst-case scenario.

Replacing Exchange 2003: Making Smart Choices

If you're currently using Exchange 2003 to handle your email, it's definitely time to upgrade — but to what? Here's what Xantrion recommends for organizations with 150+ users:

·         If cost is your primary concern, upgrade your in-house Exchange server.

·         If data security and disaster recovery are business-critical, move your email to a hosted private Exchange server — that is, a server hosted in a secure remote data center, but dedicated to your organization alone.

You'll notice that we do not recommend Office 365 or Gmail for our larger clients. The chart below will explain why.

Option	2-Year Total Cost of Ownership	Comments
In-House Exchange	$54,859*	Lowest-cost method of providing full Exchange-based functionality.   Vulnerable to natural disasters.   Requires internal staff skilled in mail server management.
Hosted Private Exchange	$66,362	Full Exchange-based functionality. Hosted in a disaster-resistant data center in Colorado.   Does not require internal staff skilled in mail server management.
Office 365 Exchange	$51,790	Vulnerable to a San Francisco earthquake.   Does not require internal staff skilled in mail server management.
Gmail	$64,728	Has fewer features than Exchange. Security, privacy, and compliance concerns. Vulnerable to a San Francisco earthquake. Does not require internal staff skilled in mail server management.

*TCO includes the estimated cost of in-house engineers needed to maintain the server infrastructure (if any) and administer the mail system, as well as the cost of off-site data backup. HIPAA-compliant mail archiving would add $12/user per month, plus a one-time fee of $990.

Is Carbonite online backup service appropriate for my business?

As online backup services proliferate and the cost to back up a gigabyte of data steadily drops, we are regularly asked about really inexpensive solutions, particularly Carbonite.

We do not recommend Carbonite for our clients. Here's why:

1. Carbonite only maintains one copy of your data. If anything happens to that single copy, your backup is simply gone.

2. We've found numerous online complaints about Carbonite's support and system performance, including these recent examples:

-A customer who was unable to restore 75% of his data after a crash.
-A customer who lost access to a 300Gb+ backup for seven weeks.
-A customer who struggled to get a response from Carbonite support after his backup stopped working entirely. 

3.  Carbonite is unable to back up a live Exchange or SQL database. This alone should be a deal breaker for business users! Carbonite itself acknowledges this is an issue and suggests that you back up your database using another tool, then use Carbonite to back up the back up. We’ve found that this doesn’t work very well. For one thing, it doesn’t allow you to verify that the third party backup took place. For another, a full Exchange backup is so large and takes so long that you'll probably only manage one offsite backup per month — one per week, if you're lucky.  

Considering other offsite backup options? Give us a call. We’re happy to help.

Well planned and executed projects: that’s the Xantrion way!

Earlier this year, Xantrion engineer Stephen Ferrero took on a complicated project that involved upgrading a critical line-of-business application for a client that could only interrupt its 24/7 operations with a single day of downtime.

Working with the software vendor's technical staff and a third-party VAR as well as our client's internal production and testing teams, Stephen converted and backed up a large SQL database, configured servers, virtualized the application, and upgraded the necessary desktop clients. He also performed ample up-front planning and testing to confirm the timing of each step of the upgrade — and drew up a contingency plan for reinstalling the previous version of the software if necessary.

The final stage of the upgrade required the client to shut down operations so the upgrade team could complete some critical tasks. One day later, the software upgrade was finished and production restarted with no delay. The project went so smoothly, the client emailed us a few days later to say the upgrade would not have been possible without Stephen's diligent support.

Well planned and executed projects: that's the Xantrion way!

What the iPad won’t do

As we mentioned last month, Gartner believes the "personal cloud" will replace the PC as the center of our digital lives within two years. However, that doesn't mean the transition will be seamless or simple. Moving applications to the cloud and synchronizing data across any device will actually require a fundamental shift in the way we think about computing.

Consider this: the new iPad 3 may be the most impressive piece of computing hardware to date, but companies can't take advantage of its true power. Why not? Because the big enterprise software vendors, like Oracle, SAP, IBM, Symantec, CA, BMC, and HP, don't make fully functional iPad apps. Their flagship products simply aren't designed for a “personal cloud”.

Xantrion is developing a solution to bridge the gap between enterprise software that is designed for mobility and software that isn’t. You'll be hearing more from us very soon about our version of the "personal cloud," which we call Desktop as a Service (DaaS).

LinkedIn security breach- change your password

How to change your LinkedIn password:
- Log in to LinkedIn
- Click your name in the upper right of the screen, select “settings” from the drop down window
- You will be required to log in again
- The password change button is below your name on the near the top left of the screen

Personal cloud to replace PC by 2014, says Gartner

Goodbye, hard drive. Hello, "personal cloud." Leading research firm Gartner predicts that by 2014, cloud services will replace the desktop computer as the hub of our digital lives. Steve Kleynhans, research vice president at Gartner, told Wired in March, "Major trends in client computing have shifted the market away from a focus on personal computers to a broader device perspective that includes smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices. Emerging cloud services will become the glue that connects the web of devices that users choose to access during the different aspects of their daily life.”

This shift is already starting to happen, and it has massive ramifications for the way companies conduct business, both internally and with customers. Kleynhans described it as a need to "fundamentally rethink how [you] deliver applications and services to users." How are you preparing? How can we help?

iPads in the office

Back in December, we blogged about Apple's growing popularity in the business world. Since then, we've received quite a few inquiries about iPads in the workplace.

Xantrion service manager Darren Nyberg has been handling these calls. These are the three questions he gets most often — and the answers he's most likely to give:

1. Email on an iPad? Absolutely. It's as easy to set up as a smartphone, and its large screen, always-on Internet connection, and affordability make it an ideal tool for mobile employees who need fast access to email and attachments.

2. Secure connectivity on an iPad? No problem. The capability is built into Apple's iOS.

3. Using your iPad as a primary computer? We generally recommend this only for health care, retail, and other special situations where employees need a lightweight way to keep information at their fingertips. The iPad's touchscreen keyboard isn't built for speed, so it's not the best tool for tasks that require a lot of typing. Frequent flyers should also stick with laptops so they can work offline in transit, since in-flight Internet is typically slow (when it's available at all).

We love the iPad's portability, and we love helping our customers take advantage of it — so if you want iPads in your office, let us help you make it happen.

Xantrion consultants, like Derrick Aquino, are a dedicated group

If we had to describe Xantrion's consultants in one word, that word might be "dedicated" — and we don't just mean the dedicated contact we assign to every client. Our consultants are willing to go the extra mile for clients, even on their own time.

One of our clients found that out during a recent move that relocated a single office and warehouse in Alameda to two separate locations in Concord. Two months before the move, operations manager Nick Hensley met with the client's IT liaison and office manager to determine what would be involved. Primary engineer Derrick Aquino then took over planning, implementation, and management. Aquino created a detailed checklist and schedule covering everything from recommending a new Internet vendor and ensuring the new location had the right kind of electrical circuits to updating all the documentation for the client's hardware.

On the Friday of the move, Aquino unracked the client's servers and networking equipment and transported it to the new location in a truck he rented for the occasion, then set up and tested the network in its new location. Once the moving company brought over the client's desktop computers and printers, Hensley and four other Xantrion engineers — Tyler Woods, Marty Tuttle, Austin Ngau, and Mike Peth — gave up their Sunday to set up and configure every workstation so the client's employees could show up on Monday and get right to work.

"Our job is to keep clients happy and get it done," Aquino says. "And in this case, everything was just humming come Monday morning. It was as smooth as a move could have gone."