Considered from a perspective where everything is running just fine, cheaper backup hardware seems like a great area to trim cost. When the inevitable happens (IT engineers quickly learn that all hardware is going to fail sooner or later) your backup becomes a vital lifeline to get the business back on its feet again quickly.

Let’s consider the common scenario of using a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device as a backup target. This is a great idea since it allows backup to finish more quickly and to take place more frequently than most tape-based solutions would. Crucially, restores can be done far more quickly than from most tape systems.

Home NAS device

Many people would first look at the capacity and then look at the price: gigabytes of storage per pound spent seems a reasonable yardstick. This would make the Western Digital My Book Edition II 2TB NAS look like a fantastic bargain at £190 or so. When you set it up with RAID 1 (mirroring) the storage space drops to 1TB but that might still be enough to back up a small server. To use any disk system without some kind of RAID, mirroring as a minimum, would be crazy. In our experience, such cheap NAS boxes are best for home use, as in this picture, where they are only written to by one machine at a time and aren’t expected to work too hard.

Small Business NAS Device

Scaling things up a bit, we have used higher capacity and higher specification NAS devices as backup targets in environments where cost is a factor. Like the Buffalo Terastation III 6TB NAS shown here, they run a version of Linux, have software RAID 1 or 5, a Gigabit network card and are built to a businesslike standard. Cost is around £900. These work well in general. However when they are written to by multiple servers at the same time, the internal hardware starts to reach its limits, which can result in missed backups. Vendor support can be patchy and is seldom speedy.

Entry Level Corporate NAS

For multiple server environments ISN use a higher grade NAS as a backup target: basically a server running a version of Windows 2008 known as Storage Server. These rack mountable enterprise level NAS devices have hardware RAID controllers, can have multiple network interfaces and a range of other hardware options. Prices start at about £2200 for the HP X1400 2TB model shown here. Dell’s PowerVault NX300 NAS is around the same price. These use standard parts and an operating system which is easy to support worldwide. If you add an onsite warranty pack, you can have an engineer from HP (or Dell) on your doorstep to fix it within 6 hours if it breaks . So much better than trying to revive a cheaper NAS at the time when you need it most.

Value doesn’t come cheap

As in so many situations, you do get what you pay for with IT hardware, just like you do with cars, cameras, smartphones, whatever. The cost of a £3000 NAS depreciated over 3 years is a minimal cost to a business compared to several days of downtime if an inadequate backup system fails to restore your critical data.

This short article only covers one aspect of data backup for businesses. We sell all the items mentioned above and many more besides. Please speak to your ISN account manager or our sales department on 020 7313 8300 to discuss whether your backup solution is robust enough for your business needs.

Here’s Paul’s take on the how studying for the CCA helped him:

“I recently studied for and passed the Citrix Certified Administrator (CCA) exam for Citrix XenDesktop 4.0.

“I have been testing various scenarios with XenDesktop in ISN’s internal Proof of Concept environment, however my studies for the CCA qualification taught me a lot more about the capabilities of the software. I read the “Citrix XenDesktop Administrators Guide” literally from cover to cover and used all the other online and printed material I could find to learn about all of the deployment methods and configuration scenarios that XenDesktop supports.

“Indeed, during my studies I tuned the configuration of our test environment to make it better suited to our own requirements. As our clients’ requirements vary greatly depending on number of users, bandwidth, applications and performance benchmarks, this sort of thorough study combined with practical experience of the product in production will be extremely beneficial when proposing a tailored implementation.

“The main benefit I found from taking the exam was understanding the emphasis Citrix place on each component of the product and how each integrate with each other. The exam also included a substantial number of questions about troubleshooting XenDesktop, which will be invaluable when supporting our XenDesktop implementations.”

If you need to know about whether virtual desktop is right for your business please call us on 020 7313 8300 for a chat about what’s possible

ISN are firm believers in #ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) as a structure for delivering and managing IT services. It has been developed as a framework, originally by the UK Government, covering all aspects of providing IT infrastructure services reliably, effectively and efficiently.

We are far from being slaves to the ITIL rule book however; customer satisfaction is always the compass we use for providing services. There is no point reinventing the wheel however and we are always keen to learn from best practice that has been shown to work in many countries and many industry sectors.

Tom brings the number of ISN staff with ITIL qualifications to five.

This year I have sat through too many presentations on the topic of Cloud Computing. These are usually at vendor events where they explain how their products are the key to unlocking the benefits of Cloud Computing.

Along with Virtualisation, the “Cloud” has been one the favourite buzzwords of sales and marketing people across the land. These dull slideshows usually begin with “What is Cloud Computing? If you ask 10 people you’ll get 10 different answers” Yawn. Next they give the example of SalesForce.com as a leader in the field. As if we didn’t know. (The BBC have been offfering “cloud” services for decades: you don’t have to have a band in your living room to listen to some music, like you used to in the olden days).

#CloudForce

The truth is that most people in business and the IT industry have a crystal clear understanding of what Cloud services offer. This was apparent from the packed audience of at least a thousand eager attendees at SalesForce’s CloudForce event yesterday at the Novotel in Hammersmith.

#SalesForce’s charismatic CEO Marc Benioff gave a compelling and very polished keynote presentation of how their products are changing how companies can get better applications to their staff far more quickly and far more affordably.

Quick effective ERP over the web

Benioff drew in senior staff from companies such as BMC Software, Vetrazzo and the Daily Telegraph. For example Vetrazzo started up 4 years ago and turn recycled glass into kitchen worktops: they developed a whole business process management system in a few months using custom tools from SalesForce. The result is that they have something which is available to all their locations via the web and can be modified really easily to suit changing or new requirements.

#ITIL Helpdesk Example

BMC Software, vendors of helpdesk application Remedy, explained how they developed a fully functional ITIL conformant helpdesk system within 4 weeks. ISN are committed to using the ITIL framework throughout our company to deliver better service to our customers. So we were very interested to hear about this in particular.

#Cloud computing business tools

ISN have been using SalesForce.com for a few years now and find it a great improvement over other CRM systems we tried. We will be looking very closely at using SalesForce’s newest tools to develop new systems that support our own business and for opportunities where cloud services from #SalesForce and other organisations can help our clients businesses too.

The MCITP: Enterprise Administrator credential has become the leading qualification for Windows Server engineers, providing the most widely recognised validation of an engineer’s ability to support and design systems based on Microsoft desktop and server operating systems.

When I asked Serhiy how he found the training he said “It has certainly given me a broader appreciation of the features of Windows 2008 than I had before, even though I have been working with Windows 2003 and 2008 on a daily basis at ISN for some time. I would recommend anyone to follow the MCITP.”

Serhiy, who originates from the Ukraine, will be putting his skills to use for ISN’s oil and gas IT support clients.

The MCITP is the leading Microsoft Certification which provides widely recognised, objective validation of Ben’s ability to plan and execute modern projects involving cutting-edge technology such as Hyper-V and iSCSI using Microsoft Server Technologies.

Most organisations cant get by without professional IT consultancy to get value out of their IT systems. London IT support and IT consultancy specialists, ISN Solutions, have a policy of keeping all our systems engineers up to date with the main hardware and software that our clients use, so that we can offer them the best advice and support.

If your business needs a Microsoft Gold Partner to assist with any infrastructure, ISN have the people with the right skills to help. Call us on 020 7313 9900 to find out more.

Better Performance

It’s faster than Windows XP and much faster than the ill-fated Vista, due to smaller resident memory requirements. Windows 7 installs far more quickly than either of its predecessors.

• Faster to startup - the record for booting a quad core PC is 19 seconds
• 64 bit version available - meaning your applications could use up to 192GB of memory
• Faster searches - find files and folders faster and more easily than in Vista or XP
• Back compatibility - run older programs in a virtual Windows XP window
• Better power management - longer battery life: some of the latest laptops can run for 6 hours or more.

Windows 7 is capable of running on existing hardware and so the PC you use today will probably be usable for the next few years: all it will need is the new operating system.

New usability features

With new features and improvements under the hood, people will be impressed with the speed and the improved stability, thus reducing the need to call your helpdesk and making it easier to get stuff done.

• New Taskbar - pin common apps to the taskbar; preview open application windows.
• Left/Right alignment - easily use two applications side by side, each occupying half your screen
• Aero Shake - May be a gimmick rather than a feature, but still handy. Grab and shake any application title bar with the mouse and all other windows minimise!

New enterprise capabilities

When used with Windows Server 2008 R2, you will be able to use new features that link with Windows 7 and provide added value to the software.

• DirectAcess - automatic VPN connection
• BranchCache - data replication and sharing
• VPN Reconnect - seamless reconnection when moving between networks (e.g. wi-fi points)

All in all, it should bring an increase in productivity and a reduction of desktop problems, bringing new life to existing hardware.

ISN have been pleased to assist Premier Oil with the IT and telecomms work involved in merging the Oilexco infrastructure.

Find out more about ISN’s work providing IT and telecomms consultancy to the oil and gas sector.

Whether the fire could have been prevented remains unclear. Maybe the business involved has the ability to continue to trade; if not, they will have a number of difficult questions to answer about business continuity and disaster recovery.

If you have a disaster recovery plan, you hope never to use it. Putting one in place however, along with enabling technologies, would drastically reduce the downtime casued by an actual disaster, while improving the underlying infrastructure for day to day operations.

Impact analysis

ISN advise customers to regularly carry out business impact analysis of each business unit of their organisation. Understanding how a disaster would affect each business unit, in terms of hard and soft costs (lost orders and loss of future orders through brand degradation) is critical to developing a robust strategy to tackle any disaster. Getting your data to the right people quickly is a decisive point in allowing your business to continue.

Understanding that your data is not the only issue to deal with: new equipment, offices, and infrastructure may also be required. Implementing plans so that every member of your business understands how to continue with business as usual, in the event of a massive business outage is key.

Solutions

ISN recommends organisations look at technologies such as virtualisation, storage and offsite backups to help circumvent these situations. Mirrored storage would allow you to have you mission critical data to be centralised off your main site and allow for replication back to your head office when new equipment is installed. That, coupled with technologies such as Citrix XenApp to allow users to work from home as if they were in the office, means you lose fewer working days. If you are small enough not to need to shared storage, offsite back up can cut data restore times and get your business going again very quickly.

Next steps

ISN provides business impact analysis for organisation and provides disaster recovery planning services, in the form of a workshop. Our aim is to ensure that in the event of your business being involved in any disaster scenario, it quickly returns to business as usual instead of becoming business confusion.

1 - Start small and work up

So that you and your team can familiarise yourselves with the concepts and issues around virtualisation, start with free or inexpensive tools like #Citrix #XenServer, #VMware ESX3i or VMware Workstation.

Try For your first production systems try running simple server workloads like Blackberry Enterprise Server, DHCP or secondary domain controllers.

2 - Take a phased approach

Don’t try to do everything all at once. Trying to do too much in one step is a recipe for downtime and disaster. Specialist consultancies can provide the tools and expertise to help you plan the best way to get to your desired end results.

3 - Don’t expect to be able to virtualise all of your systems

Sometimes you are better off with physical servers. Direct attached storage in the form of RAID arrays on an intelligent caching disk controllers will often give better performance for high throughput databases than virtual machines accessing shared iSCSI storage.

4 - Check compatibility of existing software applications

Confirm with vendors that their applications are supported on virtual machines and consider their recommendations when looking at server, network and backup options.

5 - Don’t forget about licensing

Remember OEM licenses are tied to the hardware they were bought with, so that you can’t simply convert a machine running OEM software and stay compliant. Each virtual Windows server or desktop would need its own operating system license - either volume or retail box.

6 - Think about backup and recovery up front

Although it is easier to back up and restore, a production virtual machine needs a proper rigorous backup regime in place to allow quick recovery from data loss. Choose products which are designed for virtual systems such as those from Vizioncore or Symantec.

7 - Upgrade hardware warranty

When you are running multiple production virtual machines on one physical server system, this become vital as any downtime is compounded. For HP servers ISN recommend 24/7 6 hour Call-to-repair or 4 hour response Carepack warranty extensions. Dell too offer a “4 hour Mission Critical” response add-on to their basic warranty.

8 - Build a solid foundation for the future

Don’t try to skimp and put your first production virtual machines on a low-end system as this will generally become your production environment before you know it. Hardware is cheap compared to the cost, disruption and inconvenience of rebuilding. There is also a cost to eroding users’ confidence in new systems by providing it on under-powered hardware. Choose reliable, fast server hardware with redundancy built in.

9 - Use shared storage for more flexibility

For non critical server workloads with very little data it is feasible to keep the data within the virtual machine. To get the most out of a virtual environment, realising the full benefits of disaster recovery, resilience, flexibility and performance, it is best to separate critical production data and locate it on a shared Storage Area Network (SAN) or high end Network Attached Storage (NAS) device.

10 - Plan network capacity for best performance

ISN use iSCSI or fibre channel accelerators in servers attached to a separate storage LAN with a dedicated switch fabric to guarantee fastest data access times and throughput between servers, shared storage and users. If your server uses the same LAN for iSCSI access to a SAN as it does to serve data to users, problems can arise.

11 - Use outside expertise to give you a head start

It can save a lot of time and money to use an experienced consultancy to get you started on your virtualisation project. ISN’s qualified consultants can help you get results fast and transfer practical skills to your own IT team.

If you have any questions about virtualisation or how it might work in your business, please leave a comment or call me at ISN on 020 7313 9900.