Of all of the things that are handled by your technology support department, printing is likely the one that you think about the least.  Printing isn’t fancy or exciting or a competitive advantage.  It is a lingering item from an age without portable reading devices, from an era before monitors.  Printers are going to be around for a long time to come, I do not wish to imply that they are not, but there is a lot to be considered when it comes to printers and much of that consideration can be easily overlooked.

When considering the cost of printing we often calculate the cost of the printer itself along with the consumables: paper and ink.  These things alone rack up a pretty serious per-page cost for an average business.  Planning for an appropriate lifespan and duty cycle of a printer are critical to making printing remain cost effective.  And do not forget the cost of parts replacement as well as stock-piled ink and paper.  These may seem minor, but printers often cause an investment in inventory that is never recovered.  When the printer dies, supplies for that printer are often useless.

The big, hidden cost of printing is none of these things. The big cost is in supporting the printers, both upfront with the initial deployment but even moreso in continuing support.  This is especially true in a smaller shop where the trend is to use many small printers rather than fewer large ones.  Deploying and supporting a five thousand dollar central office printer is no more than, and possibly lower than, the cost of deploying a two hundred dollar desktop inkjet.  The bigger the printer the better the support in drivers and support from the vendor that can usually be expected making normal support tasks easier and more reliable.

At a minimum, rolling out a new desktop printer is going to take half an hour.  Realistically it is far more likely to take closer to an hour.  Go ahead, count up the time: time to deliver printer to station, time to unpack printer, time to physically set up printer, time to plug in printer, time to install printer drivers and software, time to set up printer and time to print a test page.  If it was a one time race, you could probably do these steps pretty quickly.  But printer support is not a production line and rarely, if ever, do you have someone with these exact steps being performed in a rapidly repeatable manner.  Likely installing a printer is a “one off” activity that requires learning the new printer, tracking down the current driver and troubleshooting potential issues.

An hour to deploy a two hundred dollar printer could add fifty percent to the cost of the printer quite easily.  There are a lot of factors that can cause this number to skyrocket from a long travel distance between receiving location and the desk to missing cables to incompatible drivers.  Any given printer could take the better part of a day to deploy when things go wrong.  We are not even considering “disruption time” – that time in which the person receiving the printer is unable to work since someone is setting up a printer at their workstation.

Now that the printer has been set up and is, presumably, working just fine we need to consider the ongoing cost of printer support.  It is not uncommon for a printer to sit, undisturbed, for years chugging along just fine.  But printers have a surprisingly high breakage rate caused by the nature of ink, the nature of paper, a propensity for printers to be reassigned to different physical locations or for the machine to which they are attached to be changed or updated introducing driver breakage.  Add these things together and the ongoing support cost of a printer can be surprisingly high.

I recently witnessed the support of a company with a handful of high profile printers.  In a run of documentation, physical cabling and driver issues the printers were averaging between four and eight hours of technician time, per printer, to set up correctly.  Calculate out the per hour cost for that support and those printers, likely already costly, just became outrageously expensive.

I regularly hear of shops that decide to re-purpose printers and spend many times the cost of the printers in labor hours as older printers are massaged into working with newer computer setups or vice versa. Driver incompatibility or unavailability is far more common than people realize.

Printers have the additional complication of being used in many different modes such as directly attached to a workstation, directly attach and shared, directly attached to a print server, directly attached to the network or attached to a print server over the network.  While this complexity hardly creates roadblocks it does significantly slow work done on printers in a majority of businesses.

Printers, by their nature, are very difficult to support remotely.  Getting a print driver installed remotely is easy.  Knowing that something has printed successfully is something completely different.  Considering that printer support should be one of the lower cost support tasks this need for physical on-site presence for nearly every printer support task dramatically increases the cost of support if only because it increases the time to perform a task and receive appropriate feedback.

When we take these costs and combine them with the volume of printing normally performed by a printer we can start to acquire a picture of what printing is really costing.  The value to centralized printing suddenly takes on a new level of significance when seen through the eyes of support rather than through the eyes of purchasing.  Even beyond centralizing printing when possible it is important to eliminate unnecessary printing.

Good planning, strategic purchasing and a holistic approach can mitigate the potential for surprise costs in printing.

Guessing at a company’s roadmap is always a dangerous venture.  In the case of Apple today and their iOS family of products, it feels less like predicting a roadmap and more like computing a trajectory.  Apple has some serious, game changing strategy already in motion and seeing where they intend to take it seems pretty reliable.  I know that many industry pundits have covered this ground as it has been a very popular topic as of late, but I wanted to add my own voice and viewpoint to the discussion.

Over the past several years Apple has been making a lot of seemingly disconnected and questionable decisions around their purchases, research and product releases.  Each piece, seen individually, makes little sense to the outside observer.  Taken together, however, we are piecing together a picture of what appears to be grand design and careful planning.

Rapidly Apple’s fortunes have shifted from its traditional desktop market (Mac OSX) to its portable device market (iOS.)  This began, innocuously, with the iPod and slowly turned into the iPhone, iPad and, most recently, the AppleTV.  The AppleTV is the really interesting player here as this device in its first iteration was based on OSX but in its second iteration became an iOS product.  Apple actually morphed a product from one line into the other.  Very telling.

The most interesting piece of the iOS puzzle, to me, is the App Store.  The App Store seems like little more than a neat way to funnel end user funds into Apple’s ample pockets and, on the surface, it certainly was a huge success in that area.  However, the App Store represents far more than a simple attempt at increasing profit margins.  No the App Store has brought a paradigm shift to the way that end users acquire, install and manage applications.  This shift is nothing new to the technical world of Linux desktop users who have long had simple software acquisition systems that the App Store mimics but the App Store brings the ease of use of Linux’s package management to the mainstream market and does so with a revenue model that does wonders for Apple at the same time.

The App Store makes the entire process of discovering and acquiring new software nearly painless for their customers which encourages those customers to buy more apps, more often.  Traditionally computer owners buy software very infrequently.  Even with the ease of Internet downloads the rate at which software is purchased is relatively low due to complexity caused by differences between download sites, concerns over compatibility, concerns over security and quality and the need to establish a transactional relationship with the software company to facilitate payment.  The App Store solves all of those issues and also makes finding new software much easier as there is a central repository which can be searched.  By doing this, Apple’s customers are purchasing software at an incredible pace.

Apple has many reasons to look more favorably upon its iOS product family than its more traditional products.  The old Mac lineup is, in reality, just another PC in a commodity market.  While OSX has some interesting features compared to Windows it is hardly a majorly differentiated product and with Linux rapidly cutting into the PC market in the netbook and alternative computing device space there is less and less room for OSX to play in.  The iOS devices, running on Apple’s own A4 processor, offer Apple the unique opportunity to engineer their products from the ground up as a completely controlled vertical stack – they control every significant piece of hardware and software giving them unprecedented control.  This control can be leveraged into awesome stability and integration as well as profit as few outside vendors are looking for their piece of the pie.

A fully integrated hardware and operating system stack also gives Apple’s development partners an opportunity to leverage their skills to the fullest – just as video game console developers know that underpowered consoles will often outperform desktop PCs simply because the developers have an opportunity to really tweak the code just for that one, stable device.  iOS offers this in a different environment.  Unlike developing for Android or Windows Phones, iOS offers a highly stable and well known ecosystem for developers to code against allowing them to leverage more of the platform with less effort.

The iOS devices, being based on a highly efficient operating system and being built on a very low power consumption platform designed for mobility, offer significant “green” advantages over many traditional devices.  This could be Apple’s new niche.  The power user market is all but lost and Apple quietly bowed out of their long-forgotten server market this past January.  This takes Apple to the other side of the spectrum entirely, but one where Apple seems to really understand what is needed and what their market wants.  Rather than being niche, Apple is poised to be a dominant player, and there is no denying that lower power consumption “green” devices will only continue to be important in the future.

In short order, Apple is going to be in a position to control an entire ecosystem ranging from mobile computing platforms, mobile telephony, fixed television-attached media devices and, with only minor effort, desktop computing.  Desktop computing may seem like an odd place for the iOS system to go, but if we really think about what Apple is developing here, it makes perfect sense.  The transition won’t be overnight, but it is sure to come.

The first step of the transition is hard to see but it involved the AppleTV.  The AppleTV 2.0 is an iOS device that is non-mobile working its way into peoples’ homes.  Currently it is designed to function purely as a media center device, but all of the iOS functionality is there, dormant, waiting for the day when Apple decides to release an app interface and AppleTV App Store loaded with apps controlled via wireless remote, BlueTooth keyboard or whatever input device Apple decides to provide for the AppleTV.  The only things keeping the AppleTV from becoming a full fledged iOS-based desktop today is a lack of USB into which to attach keyboard and mouse and Apple’s reluctance to provide a desktop environment and App Store for the AppleTV.  The foundation is there and ready to be activated.

In reality, we are early on in the iOS lifecycle and while the platform that Apple has chosen is very mature for mobile devices it is extremely underpowered for a desktop experience.  Each generation brings more computing power to the platform, however, and in very short order a desktop based on a later revision Apple processor and iOS may easily exceed the average user’s desktop expectations.  Most home users find their desktops today to be significantly overpowered for their basic needs of email, web browsing, watching Netflix and YouTube, etc.  These are tasks for which many people are switching to their iPads already.  In another generation or two of processors we may see an AppleTV-like device that draws only four or five watts of power able to adequately power the average user’s desktop computing needs.

The second step is in the newly added App Store appearing in Mac OSX.  The addition of the App Store to the Mac platform means that the beginning of the transition is underway.  Incumbent Mac users are now being introduced to the concept of finding software, acquiring it and installing it all through a simple, integrated system just as iPhone and iPad users have been using for years now.  Had the App Store and all of its cost and limitations been introduced to users and developers on the Mac first it would have likely been shunned and faded away without real comment.  But today the Mac landscape is far different.

The plan, as I see it, with the Mac platformed App Store is to begin centralizing critical apps for the Mac ecosystem into the App Store.  Over the next two to three years this process is likely to see all major apps move in this direction leaving only smaller, less popular apps out to be handled through the traditional purchase and install system.  Once a critical mass of apps has been reached and the iOS hardware platform has matured to a point where the speed is adequate for daily desktop computing tasks Apple will flip the switch and change out the Mac OSX desktop for a new iOS desktop that is either a sister of the AppleTV or, potentially, they will simply use the AppleTV device itself encouraging Apple users to see the world of desktop computing and media delivery as one – not as unlikely as some might think given the combination of the two so common on iOS mobile devices today.

An iOS desktop could be very attractive to home users.  Many businesses might be willing to jump at the chance to move to well polished, low power consumption devices for their non-power user staff.  Those needing more power might look to use them as little more than thin clients as well.  There are many options around such a low cost device – low cost to purchase and low cost to operate.  As many companies are already forced to implement iOS management for their existing iPad and iPhone devices, adding in iOS desktop devices might be a trivial matter.  Apple has conquered many of the hurdles that it faced with Mac OSX for the iOS platform before they’ve even announced plans to make such a desktop device.

The laptop space, where Apple has a strong foothold today, is possibly the easiest platform to migrate.  The iPad is almost a full fledged laptop today.  All Apple needs to do is to add a hinge and a keyboard and they would have a device that works like an iPad but looks like the Macbook Air.  An easy transition likely to be heralded by Apple and its users alike.

Apple excels at subversive technology.  The iPod and iPhone, and to some extent now the iPad, snuck into the market as media players or phones but emerged as highly mobile computing devices used for all sort of tasks and spurred on by the success of social media.  But they sneakily did one more thing – in only a few years time the iPod Touch went from being a MP3 player and email device to being one of the most popular mobile video game platforms making Nintendo shake and basically removing Sony from the game altogether.  No one bought the iPod Touch with the intent of making it their new, primary video game device, but it happened and the iPod is an excellent video game platform that is only just beginning to see its own potential.  The iPad is following close in its stead.  It is not necessarily that the iOS platforms are the best possible mobile video game devices but that they are purchased for other purposes and are “good enough” for most of the gaming population.  What the Wii wanted to be for consoles, the device that brought non-gamers into the gaming fold, the iPod truly did for mobile gaming.

The AppleTV is now perfectly poised to do the same thing that the iPod did for mobile gaming for the console market.  As more and more game makers focus on the iOS platform it will become increasingly apparent that the AppleTV, sitting already attached to many television monitors all over the world, is a video game console already purchased and ready to go.  What the Wii did in the last generation for the console the AppleTV is ready to do for the next.  Nintendo already proved that the largest segment of the video gaming market is primarily casual gamers who are not significantly concerned with having the latest, most powerful platform or the best games.

The AppleTV could provide an even less expensive gaming console with more features than the Wii that is far more attractive for developers who can utilize the same resources that they use to make games for all of Apple’s other iOS platforms.  Almost overnight, Apple has made the basis for a video gaming ecosystem that can rival nearly any in existence today.  And, of course, in time the AppleTV platform will get more and more powerful – slowly catching up to the more expensive video game consoles making it increasingly eligible as a serious platform contender for hard core console gamers.

Apple has a lot of pokers in the iOS fire but, if executed correctly, the potential is immense.

It will take a few years for Apple to completely phase out the long standing Mac family and users will be resistant, if only for nostalgic reasons, and Apple has a few versions of Mac OSX up their sleeves yet, but I believe that the march towards a unified platform under the iOS banner is inevitable.  iOS represents the future, not only for Apple but for much of the industry.  Lower power consumption, ease of use and a minimum of different parts between many different devices.  I, for one, am very excited to see what Apple can do with such a tightly integrated ecosystem and believe that Apple has more opportunity to do great things with iOS than it ever did with the Mac platform.  This could truly be a dawning of great things for Apple and a paradigm shift for end users.

Downtime – now that is a word that no one wants to hear.  It strikes fear into the heart of businesses, executives and especially IT staff.  Downtime costs money and it causes frustration.

Because downtime triggers an emotional reaction businesses are often left reacting to it differently than traditional business factors.  This emotional approach causes businesses, especially smaller businesses often lacking in rational financial controls, to treat downtime as being far worse than it is.  It is not uncommon to find that smaller businesses have actually done more financial damage to themselves reacting to a fear of potential downtime than the feared downtime would have inflicted had it actually occurred.  This is a dangerous overreaction.

The first step is to determine the cost of downtime.  In IT we are often dealing with rather complex systems and downtime comes in a variety of flavors such as loss of access, loss of performance or a complete loss of a system or systems.  Determining every type of downtime and its associated costs can be rather complex but a high level view is often enough for producing rational budgets or are, at the very least, a good starting point on a path towards understanding the business risks involved with downtime.  Keep in mind that just like spending too much to avoid downtime is bad that spending too much to calculate the costs of downtime is bad.  Don’t spend so much time and resources determining if you will lose money that you would have been better off just losing it.  Beware of the high cost of decision making.

We can start by considering only complete system loss.  What is the cost of organizational downtime for you – that is, if you had to cease all business for an hour or a day how much money is lost?  In some cases the losses could be dramatic, like in the case of a hospital where a day of downtime would result in a loss of faith and future customer base and potentially result in lawsuits.  But in many cases a day of downtime might have nominal financial impact – many businesses could simply call the day a holiday, let their staff rest for the day and have people work a little harder over the next few days to make up the backlog from the lost day.  It all comes down to how your business does and can operate and how well suited you are for mitigating lost time.  Many business will only look at daily revenue figures to determine lost revenue but this can be wildly misleading.

Once we have a rough figure for downtime cost we can then consider downtime risk.  This is very difficult to assess as good figures on IT system reliability are nearly non-existent and every organization’s systems are so unique that industry data is very nearly useless.  Here we are forced to rely on IT staff to provide an overview of risks and, hopefully, a reliable assessment of likelihoods of individual risks.  For example, in big round numbers, if we had a line of business application that ran on a server with only one hard drive then we would expect that sometime in the next five to ten years that there will be downtime associated with the loss of that drive.  If we have that same server with hot swap drives in a mirrored array then the likelihood of downtime associated with that storage system, even over ten years, is quite small.  This doesn’t mean that a drive is not likely to fail, it is, but that the system is likely to be unaffected until redundancy is restored without end users noticing that anything has happened.

Our last rough estimation tool is to apply applicable business hours.  Many businesses do not run 24×7, some do, of course, but most do not.  Is the loss of a line of business application at six in the evening equivalent to the loss of that application at ten in the morning?  What about on the weekend?  Are people productively using it at three on a Friday afternoon or would losing it barely cost a thing and make for happy employees getting an extra hour or two on their weekends?  Can schedules be shifted in case of a loss near lunch time?  These factors while seemingly trivial can be significant.  If downtime is limited to only two to four hours then many businesses can mitigate nearly all of the financial impact simply by asking employees to have a little flexibility in their schedules to accommodate the outage by taking lunch early or leaving work early one day and working an extra hour the next.

Now that we have these factors  – the cost of downtime, the ability to mitigate downtime impact based on duration and the risks of outage events we can begin to draw a picture of what a downtime event is likely to look like.  From this we can begin to derive how much money it would be worth to reduce the risk of such as event.  For some businesses this number will be extremely high and for others it will be surprisingly low.  This exercise can expose a great deal about how a business operates that may not be normally all that visible.

It is important to note at this point that what we are looking at here is a loss of availability of systems, not a loss of data.  We are assuming that good backups are being taken and that those backups are not compromised.  Redundancy and downtime are not topics related to data loss, just availability loss.  Data loss scenarios should be treated with equal or greater diligence but are a separate topic.  It is a rare business that can survive catastrophic data loss but common to experience and easily survive even substantial downtime.

There are multiple ways to stave off downtime, redundancy is highly visible and treated almost like a buzz word and so receives a lot of focus, but there are other means as well.  Good system design is important, avoiding system complexity can heavily reduce downtime simply by removing points of unnecessary risk and fragility.  Using quality hardware and software is important as well – as low end hardware that is redundant will often fail just as often as non-redundant enterprise class hardware.  Having a rapid supply chain of replacement parts can be a significant factor often seen in the form of four hour hardware vendor replacement part response contracts.  This list goes on.  What we will focus on is redundancy which is where we are most likely to overspend when faced with the fear of downtime.

Now that we know the costs of failing to have adequate redundancy we can compare this potential cost against the very real, up front cost of providing that redundancy.  Some things, such as hard drives, are highly likely to fail and relatively easy and cost effective to make redundant – taking significant risk and trivializing it.  These tend to be a first point of focus.  But there are many areas of redundancy to consider such as power supplies, network hardware, Internet connections and entire systems – often made redundant through modern virtualization techniques providing new avenues for redundancy previously not accessible to many smaller businesses.

New types of redundancy, especially those made available through virtualization, are often a point where businesses will be tempted to overspend, perhaps dramatically, compared to the risks of downtime.  Worse yet, in the drive to acquire the latest fads in redundancy companies will often implement these techniques incorrectly and actually introduce greater risk and a higher likelihood of downtime compared to having done nothing at all.  It is becoming increasingly common to hear of businesses spending tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in an attempt to mitigate a downtime monetary loss of only a few thousand dollars – and to then fail in that attempt and end up increasing their risk anyway.

When gauging the cost of mitigation it is critical to remember that mitigation is a guaranteed expense where risk is only a risk.  Much like auto insurance where you pay a guaranteed small monthly fee in order to fend off a massive, unplanned expense.   The theory of risk mitigation is to spend a comparatively small amount of money now in order to reduce the risk of a large expense later, but if the cost of mitigation gets too high then it becomes better to simply accept the risks.

Systems can be assessed individually, of course.  Keeping a web presence and telephone system up and running at all times is far more important than an email system where even hours of downtime are unlikely to be detectable by external clients.  Paying only to protect those systems where the cost of downtime is significant is an important strategy.

Do not be surprised if what you discover is that beyond some very basic redundancy (such as mirrored hard drives) that a simple network design with good backups and restore plans and a good hardware support contract is all that is needed for the majority, if not all, of your systems.  By lowering the complexity of your systems you make them naturally more stable and easier to manage – further reducing the cost of your IT infrastructure.

In enterprise IT shops, system patching is a complicated process involving large numbers of test systems which mirror production systems so that each new patch arriving from operating system and software vendors can be tested in a real world environment to see how they interact with the hardware and software combinations available in the organization.  In an ideal world, every shop would have a managed patching process that immediately responded to newly published patches, tested instantly and applied as soon as the patch was deemed safe and applicable.  But the world is not an ideal one and in real life we have to make due with limited resources: physical, temporal and financial.

Patches are generally released for a few key reasons: security, stability, performance and, occasionally, to supply new features.  Except for the addition of new features, which is normally handled through a different release process, patches represent a fix to a known issue.  This is not a “if it is not broken, don’t fix it” scenario but is a “it is broken and has not completely failed yet” scenario which demands attention – the sooner the better.  Taking a “sit back and wait” approach to patches is unwise as the existence of a new patch means that malicious hackers have a “fix” to analyze and even if an exploit did not exist previously, it will very shortly.  The release of the patch itself can be the trigger for the immediate need for said patch.

This patch ecosystem creates a need for a “patch quickly” mentality.  Patches should never sit, they need to be applied often as soon as they are released and tested.  Waiting to patch can mean running with critical security bugs or keeping systems unnecessarily unreliable.

Small IT shops rarely, if ever, have test environments whether for servers, networking equipment or even desktops.  Not ideal but, realistically, even if those environments were available few small shops have the excess human IT resources available to run those tests in a timely manner.

This is not as bleak as it sounds.  The testing done for most patches is redundant with patching already tested by the vendor.  Vendors cannot possibly test every hardware and software interaction that could ever happen with their products but they generally test wide ranges of permutations and look at areas where interactions are most likely.  It is rare for a major vendor to cripple their own software with bad patches.  Yes, it does happen and having good backups and rollback plans are important, but in day to day operations, patching is a relatively safe process that is far more important to do promptly than it is to wait for opportunities that may or may not occur.

Like any system change, patches are best applied in frequent, small dosages.  If patches are applied promptly then normally only one or a few patches must be applied at the same time.  For operating systems you may still have to deal with multiple patches at one time, especially if patching only weekly, but seldom must you patch dozens or hundreds of files at one time when done in this manner.  When done like this it is vastly easier to evaluate patches for adverse affects and to roll back if a patch process goes badly.

The worst scenario for a small business lacking a proper patch testing workflow is to wait on patches.  Waiting means that systems go without needed care for long periods of times and when patches are finally applied it is often in large, bulk patch processes.  Applying many patches at once increases the chances that something will go wrong and, when it does, identifying which patch(es) is at fault and producing a path to remediation can be much more difficult.

Delayed patching is a process that provides little or no advantage to either IT or a business but does carry substantial risk to security, stability and performance.  Best practices for patching in a small environment is either to allow systems to self patch as quickly as possible or to schedule a regular patching process, perhaps weekly, during a time when the business is most prepared for patching to fail and patch remediation to be handled.  Whether you choose to patch automatically or simply to do so regularly through a manual process, patch often and promptly for best results.

This is general business advice that often applies to IT but is certainly not limited to that realm alone.  Outside support in IT comes from two main sources: firms who are paid (by you) to advise you and firms paid (by you) to sell you something.  The first are what we generally consider consultants.  The second are what we call resellers.

The simple rule of thumb is – never, ever get advice from a reseller.  At least not general advice, at best very specific advice centered purely around only the products that that reseller sells.  This isn’t to say that resellers are bad, far from it.  In fact, the reason that you can’t get advice from a reseller is not because of them but is because of you – let me explain.

When we go to a company to get advice we must pay for that advice.  One way or another, nothing is ever free.  Resellers traditionally earn their money by providing whatever free advice we desire and then making their money by selling us a product that has been marked up to cover their costs and to provide for their profit.  This is fine, but as the customer we need to understand that we are only compensating that reseller if they convince us to buy a product or a service that they sell and we compensate them better the more of that product that they convince us to buy.  The reseller isn’t at fault here, we need resellers and we need them to make money in this manner.  The issue is going to them and attempting to get free, general advice – we are forcing them to either work for us for free or to sell us something whether it is the right thing for us or not.  We’ve backed them into the proverbial corner and the only reasonable response is for them to attempt to sell us what they offer.  That is, after all, their job.

This leads to an additional problem, of course, which is that resellers don’t have skilled, professional, general-consultants on staff – at least not as a rule.  So if you go to a reseller and ask for advice, that reseller is almost assuredly only trained and knowledgeable on the products that they sell themselves.  They may not even be aware of what other solutions are on the market or, if they do, they do not know them to the same depth as their own products and may be unaware of advantages and caveats that you might need to know to make a truly informed decision.  Even if they did, it is not in their interest to tell you about them – you are only going to compensate them if they sell you something.

This is not to say that resellers are not good, honest, hard-working folk with value for our industry.  They are, but they aren’t magically free consultants like many people expect them to be.  Resellers are there to add consulting and selection assistance, as well as warehousing, repair, logistics and other value-adds, solely around the products that they represent.  Trying to get general consulting from a reseller is like asking your Chevy dealer to advise you as to what vehicle to buy and hoping that they equally consider all major makes, models and types of transportation as well as the regulations and limitations of all of these and are able to apply this to your unique situation – including knowing when to tell you that you don’t need to buy anything at all.  Of course, all they will do is try to sell you the best Chevy that meets your needs whether the best option for you is to just walk, buy an Impala, take a cab or to buy a fifty foot deep-sea fishing trawler.  Even if they did have the expertise to look at the big scope of your transportation needs you aren’t willing to pay them unless they give a specific answer.  So we can expect that the answer we pay for is the one that we will get.

Resellers are useful only after the decision to buy the products that they sell has already been made.  A reseller can then help you choose the right product from the range that they have.  For example, if you are buying a server from a reseller, that reseller can help you to choose which options like drive types and sizes, out of band management and other add-ons you might want.  But even then, be wary that they are likely earning more to upsell you and will recommend unneeded extras or may advise making configuration changes without understanding the entire scope of the project and how those changes from your original requirements might affect you.

Attempt to limit the advice that you receive to very concrete items such as “does this particular model offer this particular feature that I am seeking?” and avoid subjective valuations between products “is this one fast enough or should I buy the bigger one?” or “how does this compare to your competitor’s product?”

When asking subjective questions you are actually pressuring the reseller into either making more money overselling to you or losing money while trying to find the most appropriate product.  Not only do they make more money (generally) selling you the more expensive item but it also mitigates their risk that they didn’t get you what you needed.  There is no reason for them to take on risk, they’ll just try to sell you as much as possible and, if you come back unhappy, they can say “well, we tried to convince you to get a bigger, faster model but you wanted to save money and this is what happens.”  So it is not in their interest in any way to size to your needs but always to pad for safety and profit.  A position that they are put in, again, by their customers.

In most cases, principal vendors are themselves a reseller so can be considered in exactly the same way.  If you call Dell to buy a product, they will sell you a Dell no matter what your needs are.  This is not their fault, they only have one job, to sell you Dell products and if you call them for advice they can only assume that you did so because you wanted to buy a Dell.  They are no more going to consult on what IBM product to buy as they are on what car to drive or if its a good time to sell your house and move to Florida.  But they are very helpful in making sure that the Dell product that you order is going to be the one that you wanted and that the extra parts that you are getting will work with that model.  That’s what they are there for.  They will figure out how long it will take to arrive, go over warranty terms as well as give you pricing and financing options.  These are all things that your general consultant cannot do.  The two roles are complimentary, not competitive.

A perfect example of this entire scenario is one that I see happen in the real world time and time again.  With the recent explosion in virtualization businesses are turning, en masse, to vendors to find out what they need in order to dip their toes into the world of virtualization.  What I see, over and over, is instead of being sold a reasonable virtualization setup they are often sold entire systems including storage and software that in no way meets their needs and, often, actually works against their needs while costing as much as ten to twenty times what a better performing, more reliable system would have cost.  Often they are upsold into a completely unreasonable category of product for their project and then caught by budget limitations and stuck skimping – leaving them with a crippled virtualization project that could have been completed successfully for a fraction of the money spent and leaving good room for growth over time as needed.

The issue, of course, is that turning to a vendor and asking for advice on virtualization products is exactly like saying “I have no idea what I’m doing, let’s see what you can sell me on.”  And honestly, once the vendor knows you don’t even have your architectural elements worked out before contacting them, they know that the sky is the limit.  The goose has arrived and all they have to do is wait for that golden egg to be delivered.

I’ve heard this exact scenario so many times, I can’t count.  Your vendor is not your friend.  They have one job to do – sell you as many products as possible.  If you ask them what you should buy they will tell you whatever you want to hear.  They will cut corners on safety items or management items that they feel you will not find flashy or cool and will sell you what they think you will get excited about or confused about.  They know their jobs well – they have to, it is a tough market.  A great example is vendors cutting storage costs by selling smaller than appropriate storage arrays and using risky array configurations to make the capacity cost less.  That the client is at heightened risk to a failing array doesn’t impact the vendor and is a very hard issue to quantify, so once the product is sold it is the customer’s concern not the vendor’s.

The answer to this is to leverage a general consultant.  A general consultant gets compensated by delivering good advice and not for selling you a product.  In theory a general consultant will earn a similar amount regardless of whether they convince you to install millions of dollars of products or to do nothing and use what you currently own.  A general consultant should be far more intimate with your environment than a vendor or reseller could ever be and should be able to speak to your technical staff, make presentations to the business and put their advice into the proper context for your business with insight into how the costs, risks and other factors will impact you specifically and advise on what they feel is more appropriate for your specific needs.

In reality you still have to consider the complete role of your general consultant.  Most often a general consulting firm will also offer broad support and implementation services.  These are loosely tied to their recommendations so caveat emptor applies as always, but since they are compensated in a far more direct manner (paid for their effort) they have a very real reason to deliver you what you are buying.  Even general consultants who have some ties to reselling often make a very small fraction on the resold goods as they do on the consulting so anything that puts their consulting work at risk is a major liability to them.  Make sure that any general consultant, if offering resold services, is not tied to them and works with other resellers or vendors as well.  Sometimes general consultants offer low cost reseller services as a loss leader or at minimal profit just to keep customers from feeling that they must turn to another company but would prefer if their customers did not use  that service – profits are often higher not reselling.

Your general consultant should be able to interface with your resellers or vendors directly or allow you to do so.  Having a consultant handle the transaction can be beneficial because it provides an integrated procedure and consultants are very unlikely to be persuaded to make snap decisions based on sales, “special deals” or to be sold on a different approach by a salesperson who has a specific product to push that month.  The consultant has little emotional tie to the purchasing process and so can be much more methodical and calculating.

Of course we must consider the opposite situation as well – how do we treat our service providers?  For example, if we go to a reseller over and over again asking for advice, making them generate quotes and generally spin their wheels and then buy nothing from them or very little we will, sooner or later, force them to either refuse to work with us at all or do something drastic like supplying less than accurate data or raising prices.  A good vendor or reseller will provide you with the best value when you treat them well.  Loyalty may seem to be dead in business transactions today, but this is not at all true.  Good relationships still pay off.

With consultants the need to treat them well is somewhat built into the equation – you generally pay for what you get so other than being friendly and respectful you don’t normally have too much to worry about as far as how you are structuring your relationship.  But even with a consultant there are still concerns.  If you pay for an “unlimited” service plan, use it well but don’t abuse it, for example.  Always make your consultant happy that you are their customer and, most likely, they will work hard to make sure that you are happy to be their customer too.

The most important concept to take away from this is that with any company with whom you do business, you should have some empathy for them.  Put yourself in their shoes and think about how your relationship with them is structured.  Are your goals mutually aligned?  Is it in both companies’ interests to act in the interest of the other?  Or have you arranged for an adversarial relationship where they can only win at your expense?

Keep in mind that you are the customer so, very likely, your consultant or reseller is, to some degree, at your mercy to make sure that your relationship is a healthy one.  In order to obtain clients they are often pressured into a position of accepting a less than ideal arrangement.  As the client, you have the opportunity to be the client that that consultant or reseller is excited to work for and will go out of their way to make happy.  The choice is very much yours to make in most cases.  Choose well because good relationships can work wonders for your business.

Ask a jeweler what to get your wife for your anniversary and he will say: “You can’t go wrong with jewelry.”

Ask a florist what to get your wife and he will tell you: “Women always love flowers.”

Ask a chocolatier and he will tell you that nothing makes a woman happier than chocolate.

Ask a consultant he will ask you: “What does your wife like?”

What’s your reason for not upgrading to Windows 7? Many IT managers wait for the first service pack before deploying an OS upgrade; others update the operating system as part of a hardware refresh. Here are some advantages to upgrading.

1) Inevitability

If you have been watching Microsoft’s enterprise desktop operating systems over the past two decades then you are aware that there is a pattern emerging and that pattern places Windows 7 as the long term successor to Windows XP and that XP was the clear successor to NT 4.0.  Each of these were the golden child of the Microsoft machine, blessed with prime market positioning, lack of extreme overhauls and sporting a high level of polish.  As such, whether you are seeking the latest and greatest or just looking for the best desktop OS investment, Windows 7 meets your needs.  Windows 7 is here to stay and adoption rates are already very high.

Once you accept that Windows 7 is coming to your environment sometime over the next several years then the question truly becomes: “What are you waiting for?”  The sooner that you get Windows 7 in place, the sooner you can make the transition and the sooner you can start reaping the benefits of the latest technologies and nearly a decade of development since Windows XP originally released – and let’s face it, most shops are moving from XP to 7 today.  You will achieve your greatest benefits from Windows 7 the sooner that you put it in place giving your users maximum time to adapt to it and giving you more time to take advantage of its features.
2) Performance

One of the biggest complaints of users who switched to Vista from XP was a lack of performance.  Windows 7 addressed this very well and is more performant than Vista and has lower minimum requirements allowing it be used in the Netbook realm that had been previously reserved for Windows XP up through the Vista era.  Windows 7 runs nicely on Vista-era equipment and much of the XP-era equipment while taking good advantage of new hardware as well making it a good option for in-place software upgrades.

Having a Windows operating system that actually outperforms its predecessor on the same hardware is a major feat.  Traditionally an OS was only expected to be comparable or faster when used on hardware current to its release.  Unlike any other Windows upgrade, Windows 7 can be deployed onto existing hardware without needing hardware upgrades and you will still see small performance gains.  This alone removes one of the traditional obstacles to in-place operating system upgrades.
3) Security

Security is always of concern and Windows 7 comes with a slew of security enhancements.  The best one results in an improved user experience as well – the update of User Account Control (UAC.)  This update makes UAC, the bane of Windows Vista, into the security tool that it was always meant to be.  UAC is now easy to use and control but still powerful enough to protect you in critical ways.  Moving from XP to 7 provides a very important security update from a technology side while moving from Vista to 7 makes this technology user friendly enough that it can remain enabled without the bulk of users demanding that it be removed.
4) Solid State Drive Support

With solid state drives rapidly dropping in price and growing in popularity, having specific support for them in Windows 7 is a very big deal today but especially over the next few years as solid state drives move from the realm of power user equipment to mainstream user equipment.  Solid state drives work best when the drivers handling them are aware that they are solid state.  SSDs should not be treated like tradition, spindle-based hard drives for maximum performance and reliability benefits.

Windows 7′s solid state enhancements like TRIM and removal of spindle drive tools like Superfetch and ReadyBoost give SSDs better performance and longer lifespan on Windows 7 then on previous Windows iterations.  These features may not seem like a big deal today but over the lifespan of Windows 7, as SSDs become more and more of an expected desktop component for the average office worker these SSD-specific features will play a bigger and bigger role.
5) XP Mode

XP Mode is one of those really stand-out features that sets Windows 7 apart from its predecessors.  Previous Windows version have struggled in handling legacy applications.  Windows 7′s new approach of including a Windows XP operating system as a complete virtual machine handles this issue in a graceful way.  Now legacy apps are more reliable and the Windows 7 system is not encumbered with extra subsystems needed to handle legacy systems.  With Windows XP having been such a dominant player like no Windows platform had been before, this approach is brilliant and a shrewd move on Microsoft’s part.  XP Mode delivers a level of confidence that existing apps will continue to work on Windows 7 – even apps that no longer see active development and are not being tested against the newest Microsoft operating systems.  Once again, Windows 7 provides more than its predecessor in an area where we would not expect to see this – backwards compatibility.  Windows 7 is dramatically more compatible with Windows XP software than Vista is.
6) Branch Cache

Enterprise customers can leverage Branch Cache, Microsoft’s new WAN optimization technology targeted at supporting branch offices within a larger, enterprise environment.  Branch Cache can be a significant feature for the many companies who struggle with providing storage resources out to small, remote offices.  Branch Cache’s ability to seamlessly store previously accessed CIFS and web resources out at a branch office can, for some businesses, mean that extra equipment and larger Internet connections need not be purchased which can result in substantial cost savings and branch office productivity gains.  Branch Cache will also reduce loads on central storage systems allowing file server dollars to be stretched a little farther too.
7) Direct Access

Previous versions of Windows have had VPN products included with them but Direct Access takes the idea of “always connected mobility” to a new level.  Direct Access adds seamless VPN to Windows which gives users a unified experience between remote and “in office” computing modes.  No longer do users need to manage their VPN experience – as long as they are online they are connected to the office.  Direct Access leverages IPv6 and IPSec for simple, efficient and extremely secure remote computing.  Direct Access is designed to work with Microsoft’s existing authentication systems allowing it to be used for normal, everyday computing without breaking communications with Active Directory so that both the machine and the user can properly authenticate – even when working remotely.

Summary) At the end of the day, however, what makes Windows 7 compelling isn’t any significant feature.  In fact, it is the lack of major features that makes Windows 7 so important.  Like XP, its spiritual predecessor, Windows 7 tweaks a working formula.  Vista introduced the new kernel, the new interface, UAC and other features.  Introducing change is painful.  Windows 7 takes what works and makes it better.  Windows 7 is the long term, strategic desktop decision because it is a polished system that introduces small, incremental updates and relies on established features to drive its overarching value.  Think of 7 as the evolutionary whereas Vista was revolutionary.

Corporate interviewers often forget that interviews are a two way street: yes the company is interviewing the hopeful job candidate but that candidate is interviewing the company as well.  Unless you are a wildly well known and highly desired company at which to work (e.g. Apple, Microsoft or Google) then you have probably little more than the interview process in which to demonstrate what kind of company you are to a potential candidate and even then many candidates will take the media’s opinions of working at those companies with a proverbial grain of salt.

No matter how fashionable or well respected the firm, most likely a job candidate will get one chance to peer into the inner workings of your company.  They will not judge you based on your cafeteria food nor on how friendly the staff is nor the lengthy, and probably completely inaccurate, job description – all of that is a form of marketing – a good candidate knows that and is exposed to it all of the time.  No, they will judge you based on your processes and the only process that you can’t gloss over, hide or fake is the interviewing process.

A company’s ability to interview effectively is the best cradle to grave process example that a candidate will see – very likely it will be the only one.  And since this is a process that affects all others, in that every person at the company was selected using it, it is also the best way to indicate to the candidate what the overall company is likely to be like and how it functions.  A good hiring process reflects a healthy company using good processes and possessing good staff, a bad hiring processes reflects a company with generally poor procedures and staff consisting mostly of those unable to find work someplace more attractive.

The hiring process is so often either complete afterthought or, at best, based completely around weeding out bad candidates that there is little thought put into convincing good candidates to accept a position at the firm.  The better the candidate the more likely that that candidate is already working and getting offers from more than one company.  The interview process must often convince a candidate that the unknown of your company is better than their existing, known position and that it is better than the unknowns of potentially many other firms.  Overcoming the “devil you know” issue can be very difficult, especially if that candidate already has a great job.  Ask yourself, “If I had their job, why would I leave it to come work for me?”

Vetting a potential candidate is not something that interviewers and the hiring process creators are likely to forget or overlook, but focusing so heavily on ruling out bad candidates will often also tell good candidates that this isn’t a place where they are interested in working.  Good candidates don’t want to work in a place lacking bad people, they want to work in a place full of good people.  The two are not the same thing.

Having a good, efficient and goal-oriented interviewing process can be difficult, especially if your firm is large and follows traditional interviewing practices in a codified manner.  There is no simple equation to running a great interview process, what every company’s technical needs and cultural needs are will dictate how best to approach enticing the best fitting candidates.  There are simple rules, though, that must be followed.

Every potential candidate that you will ever interview is full of horror stories from their own job hunts over the course of their careers.  Some are nearly universal, such as stories about how the human resources department sabotaged an otherwise perfect fit position, while others are unique and surprising.  Anyone that you will be interviewing will be thinking about their own past experiences as well as stories that they have heard from others and will be thinking about these things as they go through your company’s process.  Most process issues can be resolved, or at least mitigated, simply by taking the time to empathize with the candidates and see the process from their perspective.

Running a good interview process can start with the simplest of things like making sure that the team preparing to interview a candidate are on time, prepared for the interview, the appropriate people for that interview, aware of what they are interviewing for, etc.  Too often candidates go to an interview just to find that they are being interviewed by random people in the office who just happened to be available.  Those interviewers have not seen the resume ahead of time nor are aware of the qualifications that they are seeking.  You would not be impressed if the candidate being interviewed was late and unprepared, why are we then surprised if they are equally unimpressed when we are unprepared.  We can hardly fault a candidate for not taking the interview seriously if we are not taking it seriously, but this is exactly how the average interview goes – the candidate is far more prepared than the interviewing team.

Human resources presents one of the most well understood failures in the interviewing process.  HR is seldom prepared to speak to a potential candidate in any meaningful way in the information technology arena.  Rarely, if ever, is HR in a position to judge a candidate’s skillset, skill level, ability to mesh with a team or appropriate compensation.  HR could be involved for verifying resume data or supplying benefits details, of course, but only after a candidate is otherwise selected.  Every IT professional can spot a job description that HR has touched and great candidates turn down your firm at this stage, long before they ever show up in any statistic.  You are losing potential employees, the best potential employees, before you ever find out that they were giving you a moment of their time.  You may also accidentally turn away candidates who would happily have accepted a position with your firm but were misled into believing that they were not qualified for a position due to nothing more than an incorrect, often impossible, job description.

It is important, too, to have a generally well laid out and efficient process to move from one interviewing stage to another and to do so, from end to end, in a relatively short period of time.  I myself have had poorly planned interviewing processes that stretched for longer than six months.  In these cases the people involved will often change positions, or even companies, during the process and the same stages might get repeated over and over with the interviewing company not remembering the candidate or what had been said and determined in earlier interviews.  If an interviewing process spans more than about a week the process is too long and the stages are too disconnected.  Decisions should also come in a timely manner, not weeks after an interview has taken place.

The interview process should be designed around the desired candidate traits.  If you want to hire someone to just hit the ground running and have no long term viability, focus purely on tech skills.  If you want someone to be a part of the team, focus on personality and just make sure that they can learn the tech skills in an amount of time that is appropriate for your needs.  If a position is important enough to hire someone to fill, it is important enough to interview well to get the right person.  Hiring a new staff member is a very big deal, nothing defines your company more than the people that it hires.  Nothing should be taken more seriously than the processes used to acquire the best staff.

Communications between interviewers and stages is important.  An interviewee will not be impressed if asked the same question multiple time, especially not if asked by the same person.  This is far more common than interviewers may realize.

Put yourself into the shoes of your candidates.  Think about how they will see your company when they interview with you.  Will they see an organization that treats them with respect and professionalism?  Will they see you as prepared and highly skilled?  Will they see processes that encourage the kind of people that they want to work with to join your firm?  Or will they see that your company thinks that hiring good people is not a priority?  Will they find that their future coworkers aren’t the cream of the crop and that they aren’t being hired to compliment good people but to provide skills that you have failed, thus far, to cultivate?  Will they see processes designed to weed out bad people but that fail to attract good ones?

Interviewing processes do not need to be exceptionally formal or rigid.  Alternative approaches can work wonders and can tell a candidate much about your company.  But make sure that any process that you implement reflects positively on your firm and is not turning away the candidates that you might wish to hire.

No matter how much you imagine that candidates should be beating down your doors to come work for you – those candidates don’t know that.  Until you convince them otherwise, you are just another unlikely job prospect to them in an endless sea of job listings – unlikely that they will get an offer and unlikely that they will accept one if received.  Job seekers are inundated with job listings and head hunters daily.  Most companies that a candidate will decide to interview with will turn out to not even really be hiring but are just “fishing” – looking to see what the candidates and going compensation rates are like in the current market.   A candidate is not going to get excited until they feel that you are a serious firm and that the job sounds exciting.

Interviewers generally approach candidates with the impression that the candidate is begging for the position and that they are charged with turning away all but the best option.  But there is a very good chance that the person that you are interviewing was cajoled or begged (or even bribed) to sit across that table from you by a headhunter, consulting or staffing firm.  Often they’ve been lead there under false pretenses, such as being told that compensation is as much as double what is actually your realistic cap or that they will be in a far more senior position than you are interviewing for.  In that person’s eyes it is you the interviewer, not they the interviewee, who is in the begging position.

If a candidate is brought in by a staffing firm then chances are that that candidate has been presented with a very different view of the situation than you expect.  Likely they have been told great and unrealistic things about the position and they see that staffing firm as the direct and official representative of your firm – which if you have hired them, they are.  So you are effectively reaching out to candidates, pre-selecting them and asking them to come interview with you.  To the candidate, they are doing you the favor, not the other way around.  If they show up and you are not ecstatic that they took the time out of their schedules to meet with you they are going to be less than impressed.  They assume that you have sifted through large numbers of candidates and selected them for a reason.

Using a staffing firm is never advised, in my opinion.  They do not represent the interests of you as the hiring company nor of the candidates.  They, at best, are a point of miscommunications and increased cost.  At worst they play both parties against each other for their own gain.  Like an HR department, they have very little to add to a selection process but have the capacity to wreak nearly unlimited damage.  The best companies, no matter what size they are, take the time to make their hiring process a purely internal one.  No matter what type of business you are in, the ability to attract, acquire and retain the best staff is the best competitive advantage possible.  If your hiring process isn’t taken seriously there is no way that you can compete  cost effectively.  Your only option is to raise salaries to a point that enough candidates concerned about money over job quality are willing to come work for you.  This can work but is very expensive, and not completely effective, compared to having great hiring practices.

The bottom line is that your hiring practices dictate what you are and will become as a company.   If you don’t acquire and develop good staff you won’t have them to drive efficiency and innovation.  Take your hiring process very seriously and consider how your company presents itself to a candidate.  Remember, weeding out bad people is easy.  Attracting good ones is hard.

My sister in law once asked me why they have so many computer problems and we do not.  My wife and I are both technology consultants and our home network probably seems incredibly stable to the casual observer.  This question, in one form or another, comes up pretty often.  I thought about it at length and feel that there are really a number of common factors that are pretty common to find differing between how the average IT professional sets up their home computers (as opposed to their work computer) and how the average user does.  Not every IT pro does these things and not ever non-IT person does not, but these are pretty common differentiators that all factor in to stability of the home computing environment.

1. We Don’t Log In as the Administrator.  This is probably the single biggest difference between normal users and IT professionals at home.  Running as the administrator for every day computing just isn’t wise – any malicious or misbehaving application will be able to be malicious with your user privileges, which as the administrator are unlimited.  I have been working in IT for over twenty years and would never use the administrator account for anything but system maintenance tasks.  It just isn’t safe.  The entire purpose of having these different types of accounts is for your protection.
2. Keep the System Patched. A patched computer is, more or less, a safe computer.  Those patches that come out from Microsoft, Apple and your application vendors are there for a reason – because a problem has been found and they want to get it fixed before something bad happens to you and it is their fault.  Once a patch is released, you need to get it installed right away because the security hole that it patches is now public knowledge and you are particularly vulnerable in the time right after the patch is released.  Nearly anytime that I log onto someone else’s computer the first thing that I notice is that there are a large number of security patches waiting to be installed.  Never let this happen – patch immediately.
3. Use AntiVirus and Software Firewall.  Running a good antivirus (there are plenty of free ones for home users) is quite important as is having a firewall on your computer.  AntiVirus helps your computer protect itself against known attacks and will look for dangerous files on your computer that may have been downloaded, found on removable media, on a website, etc.  In theory, if you are not the administrator and are well patched viruses will be able to do only limited damage, but any damage you can prevent is a good thing.   A software firewall on your computer is an added layer of protection as well – for home users it is pretty minor but it is free and you should never turn down valid protection.
4. Use a Real Firewall.  A software firewall on your computer is not enough, you should always have a real, hardware firewall as well.  This does not have to be an expensive device and you will often need one for other purposes anyway – such as sharing your Internet connection with multiple users – just make sure that you have one installed.  This is far more important than having a software firewall but neither is an excuse for not having the other.  You need both.
5. Never Use the Pre-Installed Operating System.  This is one of those “tricks” that IT pros learn after working on many, many machines.  Computers come with a pre-installed copy of the operating system on them.  This pre-installed copy normally is loaded with horrible software that you would never, ever want to have installed on your computer and is often just trials of software that you will have to buy to use.  You don’t want this.  Instead, take the operating system installation media that came with your computer (you didn’t buy a computer without it, did you?) and install a fresh copy of your operating system without any of that additional stuff before you do anything with that computer.  This is important for two reasons: first that you eliminate all of that useless advertising that might even go so far as to break your computer and second it gives you a basic install that you can repeat later, which is important.
6. Reinstall the Operating System Periodically.  Over time, on Windows especially, you will notice a deterioration of your computer over time.  Except in the cases of hardware failure, this is caused by a sprawl of data, settings, registry changes, etc. on your hard drive.  There are techniques for fixing this but none are perfect.  From time to time, often once every one to two years, it is very advantageous to blow everything away and install the operating system fresh (as in the tip above) and start over with a “new” computer.  As long as the hardware has not begun to fail your computer will now behave exactly as it did the day that you got it.  (Do not forget to patch it immediately.)  This also gives you the very important chance to reinstall only those applications that you actually need and use and leave unused ones behind (along with any malware that has found its way onto your system.)
7. Have a Spare Computer.  It is a rare IT professional who relies on a single desktop or laptop for everything that they do.  There is too much riding on the ability to be online, all the time to only have one computer.  The slightest hiccup and you are unable to do anything – including unable to look up what you need to know to fix your computer!  Having a spare computer means that you have another computer to use while you are busy reinstalling the operating system on your main computer, for example.  It also gives you a secondary location from which you can verify that all of your critical data is still available while working on your main machine which is some serious peace of mind.
8. Take Good Backups.  Nothing is more important to IT professionals than backups.  Backups are what keep us in business.  Most likely these days you will find IT pros not only have an external hard drive (or better, an actual storage server) in their homes on which they keep complete copies of everything that matter to them but also that they have online backups going to a cloud storage provider so that should their home be lost (flood, fire, tornado) that they would still have their precious files.  Losing your photographs, home movies, financial records, etc. can be quite tragic – take steps to protect these.  If you do it right, you should never fear your computer dying beyond the slight annoyance that it takes to install your operating system again.
9. Don’t Install Just Anything.  What you install and run on your computer matters.  IT professionals are generally pretty wary of what they install and normally only install known applications from trusted vendors – not any random piece of software that is found on the Internet.  It is important to know what you are installing and why you want it.  The average computer user, IT pros included, actually need very few different applications on their computers.  The fewer you install the fewer you need to maintain and the less chance that you will have one that damages your system or slows it down.  Often when helping non-IT professionals with their computers I find that the computers are full of applications that no one has ever heard of and the person whose system has them installed has never really used or may not even know what they are!  This is how the bulk of malware gets installed.
10. Download Drivers, Don’t Use Vendor CDs.  IT Pros know that drivers are critical to system stability and that the latest are available from vendor websites.  Any CD with a driver for a new piece of hardware that you just bought is pretty much guaranteed to be out of date and, more often than not, the vendor will use the opportunity of you putting their CD into your drive to install extra software that you don’t want onto your computer.  Avoid this completely; use the vendor website to get the latest drivers immediately and don’t use the media that comes with your hardware.
11. Buy Commercial, Not Consumer, Equipment.  I’ve written whole articles on this in the past – this is one of those industry insider tricks.  In business, we look for computers to be stable and reliable, not flashy and “cool”.  Nothing is cooler than a computer that works reliably.  Big computer vendors make one line for consumers to be sold at your local store and another line for discerning companies who do their homework.  Skip the in-store buying.  Go directly to the big vendors (don’t even think about buying something made by the guy down the street) and stick exclusively to their commercial or business lines.  These lines are built for buyers in the know who need their computers to be cost effective over their lifetimes, not to be cheap up front.
12. Have a regular maintenance routine.  There are simple tasks that need to be done all the time such as defragging your drives, cleaning up unneeded files and blowing the dust out of your machine.  IT pros regularly maintain their computers to maintain system health.  Computers are not just “set and forget” devices.  They are just too complex for that.  That being said, though, most tasks can be automated.
13. Run wires.  Wireless networking is simple, clean and easy.  It is also slow and difficult to troubleshoot.  When possible, consider running cabling in your home so that your computers, at least the desktops, game consoles and other stationary devices, can get the speed and stability advantages of cabling.  The more devices on your cabled network also means the fewer devices that will be competing for wireless resources.
14. Use a UPS.  A UPS, or uninterruptable power supply, is a crucial component in protecting your computer equipment.  It protects computers from disruptions and surges in the power grid.  Computers are very sensitive to power problems and an inexpensive UPS can go a long way to keeping your computer healthy for a long time.  More importantly, it protects against data loss.

The basic tip here is – treat your home like a business, not like a toy.  The average home user doesn’t take their computer seriously at all and never gives it a second thought until something goes horribly wrong – and then it is likely too late.  Your computer is one of your most expensive and most important possessions, treat it more like a car and less like a toaster.

As IT managers we face the need to deal with two very different types of technical professionals.  These two types of professionals are separated, not by their personality types or working styles, but by the very nature of their job roles.  Understanding the unique needs of these two job types is critical in effectively managing technical workers, but few IT departments truly take the time to understand and appreciate the nuances inherent to these two different job roles.

The first type, and by the far the best understood, I will call the “engineer.”  This engineering role encompasses a massive array of job functions ranging from software developers and designers, architects, system engineers, network engineers or anyone whose primary function is to creatively design or implement new systems of any sort.  The term engineer is a loose one but is relatively meaningful.

The second type of technology worker role can be generically referred to as the “support” role.  Support professions might include helpdesk, systems administration, desktop support, network monitoring, command center, etc.  What separates support professionals from engineering professionals is that they are not tasked with creative processes involving new designs or implementations but instead work with existing systems ensuring that they run properly and get fixed quickly when something is wrong.

It goes without saying that no one real-world human is likely to ever be completely in only one category or the other, but almost all job functional in IT focus very heavily upon one or the other.  It is pretty safe to assume that almost any role will be exceptionally weighted to one role or the other.  It is very rare for a single position to be split evenly between these roles.

Where this identification of roles comes into play is in knowing how to measure and manage technical staff.  Measuring and managing engineers, from a very high level, is quite well understood.  The concept of productivity is very simple and meaningful for engineering roles.   The goal of managing an engineering person or team is to allow and encourage that role to output as much creative design or implementation as possible.  The concept of quality exists as well, of course, but we still can think generally about engineering roles in relatively concrete terms such as number of functions written, number of deployment packages produced, size of network designed, etc.  Metrics are a fuzzy thing, but we at least have a good idea of what efficiency means to an engineer even if we cannot necessarily measure it accurately.

Support roles do not have this same concept.  Sure you could use an artificial metric such as “tickets closed” to measure productivity in a support role, but that would be very misleading.  One ticket could be trivial and the next a large research challenge.  In many cases there may be no tickets available for a long time and then many arrive at once that cannot be serviced simultaneously.  Productivity is likely to be sporadic and non-sustainable and, ultimately, not at all meaningful to measure.

Engineering positions earn their keep by producing output effectively over a rather long period of time often even spanning into months and years for large projects.  The goal, therefore, with engineering positions is to provide an environment that encourages sustainable productivity.  It is well know that engineers will often gain productivity by working shortened or alternative hours, taking regular vacations, etc.  Not only does this often increase productivity but often greatly increases the quality of the output as well.

Support positions earn their bread and butter by “being there” when needed.  If a support person is attempting to work at maximum efficiency there is a natural implication that there is a continuous backlog of support issues awaiting the support team’s attention and that there are many people requiring support who have to wait for it in order to form a queue.  By having a queue always in place this also means that support personnel are continuously taking work off the stack instead of resolving live items – either ignoring high priority items or being regularly interrupted – causing continuous context switching which significantly reduces the ability to efficiently handle the queue – whose entire purpose for existing was to create the appearance of artificial productivity in the first place.

Support roles are “event driven.”  I like this terminology because I think it most accurately describes the mode in which nearly all support professionals work.  Whether an event is generated by a phone call, an instant message, an email or a ticket it is an “event” that kicks off the transition of the support person from idle to action or, in some cases, from a low priority item to a high priority item.  One way or another, an event represents a “context switch” for the support professional.  Without an event there is nothing for a support professional to do.  Even if the “event” is represented by a ticket queue or an email backlog it is still a form of event.

Having a truly efficient support desk requires careful management of the event process.  Having a never ending queue of support issues is exhausting for the support professionals and it also means that no amount of staff is ever in an “idle” state awaiting high priority items.  Because of this, high priority items are either not addressed as quickly as they should be or else in-process items are neglected.

Understanding the event driven nature of support staff is critical to understanding how to approach the management of these teams.  There are no simple answers, and metrics of support staff are often even more meaningless than those of engineering staff – so use with extreme caution, but by empathizing with the support role we can begin to see where our role as a support manager plays into the bigger picture of supporting and promoting the support team members.

The most important concept, from my experiences, is providing a good flow of the interrupts going to the support team.  Often support teams are handling a number of different avenues for support, such as email and telephone.  Restricting and funnels events to appropriate channels is critical.

The problem with telephones is that they are aggressive and demand an immediate context switch whether the recipient is idle or if they are currently supporting the most critical production outage in corporate history.  The person calling is guessing that their immediate need outweighs the current needs of whomever the support person is currently supporting.  Telephones cause this problem everywhere that they are used.

Think about the last time that you were at a pizza parlor placing your order at the counter.  You waited in line patiently as each person was served.  You did the right thing.  You arrive at the front of the queue.  You begin to place your order when, the phone rings.  The person taking your order puts you on “hold” even though you are standing right there, picks up the phone, takes the order, hangs up and returns to you.  What this says is that the person calling, being the “squeaky wheel”, is more important to the restaurant than are the people actually in the restaurant.  This same effect happens on many support desks – in process work is interrupted by calls going to a group line or directly to the support person.  This is, at best, inefficient and at worst may disrupt critical support processes for highly critical issues.

So when thinking about how to manage IT professionals, think about the purpose of their role.  The goal of an engineer is productivity.  The goal of a support professional is availability.

A question that comes up on a pretty regular basis is whether or not servers should be routinely rebooted, such as once per week, or if they should be allowed to run for as long as possible to achieve maximum “uptime.”  To me the answer is simple – with rare exception, regular reboots are the most appropriate choice for servers.

As with any rule, there are cases when it does not apply.  For example, some businesses running critical systems have no allotment for downtime and must be available 24/7.  Obviously systems like this cannot simply be rebooted in a routine way.  However, if a system is so critical that it can never go down then this situation should trigger a red flag that this system is a point of failure and perhaps consideration for how to handle downtime, whether planned or unplanned, should be initiated.

Another exception is some AIX systems need significant uptime, greater than a few weeks, to obtain maximum efficiency as the system is self tuning and needs time to obtain usage information and to adjust itself accordingly.  This tends to be limited to large, seldom-changing database servers and similar use scenarios that are less common than other platforms.

In IT we often worship the concept of “uptime” – how long a system can run without needing to restart.  But “uptime” is not a concept that brings value to the business and IT needs to keep the business’ needs in mind at all times rather than focusing on artificial metrics.  The business is not concerned with how long a server has managed to stay online without rebooting – they only care that the server is available and ready when needed for business processing.  These are very different concepts.

For most any normal business server, there is a window when the server needs to be available for business purposes and a window when it is not needed.  These windows may be daily, weekly or monthly but it is a rare server that is actually in use around the clock without exception.

I often hear people state that because they run operating system X rather than Y that they no longer need to reboot, but this is simply not true.  There are two main reasons to reboot on a regular basis: to verify the ability of the server to reboot successfully and to apply patches that cannot be applied without rebooting.

Applying patches is why most businesses reboot.  Almost all operating systems receive regular updates that require rebooting in order to take effect.  As most patches are released for security and stability purposes, especially those requiring a reboot, the importance of applying them is rather high.  Making a server unnecessarily vulnerable just to maintain uptime is not wise.

Testing a server’s capacity to reboot successfully is what is often overlooked.  Most servers have changes applied to them on a regular basis.  Changes might be patches, new applications, configuration changes, updates or similar.  Any change introduces risk.  Just because a server is healthy immediately after a change is applied does not mean that the server nor the applications running on it will start as expected on reboot.

If the server is never rebooted then we never know if it can reboot successfully.  Over time the number of changes having been applied since the last reboot will increase.  This is very dangerous.  What we fear is a large number of changes having been made, possibly many of them undocumented, and a reboot then failing.  At that point identifying what change is causing the system to fail could be an insurmountable process.  No single change to roll back, no known path to recoverability.  This is when panic sets in.  Of course, a box that is never rebooted intentionally is more likely to reboot unintentionally – meaning the chance of a failed reboot is both more likely to occur and more likely to occur while in active use.

While regular reboots are not intended to reduce the frequency of failed reboots, in fact they actually increase the occurrence of failures, the purpose is to make those failures easily manageable from a “known change” standpoint and, more importantly, to control when those reboots occur to ensure that they happen at a time when the server is designated as being available for maintenance and is designed to be stressed so that problems are found at a time when they can be mitigated without business impact.

I have heard many a system administrator state that they avoid weekend reboots because they do not want to be stuck working on Sundays due to servers failing to come back up after rebooting.  I have been paged many a Sunday morning from a failed reboot myself, but every time I receive that call I feel a sense of relief.  I know that we just caught an issue at a time when the business is not impacted financially.  Had that server not been restarted during off hours, it might have not been discovered to be “unbootable” until it had failed during active business hours and caused a loss of revenue.

Thanks to regular weekend reboots, we can catch pending disasters safely and, thanks to knowing that we only have one week’s worth of changes to investigate, we are routinely able to fix the problems with generally little effort and great confidence that we understand what changes had been made prior to the failure.

Regular reboots are about protecting the business from outages and downtime that can be mitigated through very simple and reliable processes.

It is an old story in SMB IT, IT managers who get their start young, stay with a single company, work their way through the ranks and become venerable IT managers who have never worked outside of their current environment.  Just like the “good old days” when people stuck with a single company for their entire careers, this too sounds like a wonderful thing.  But IT has long rewarded “job hoppers”, those technically minded folk who move from shop to shop every few years.  The lack of direct upward mobility within single shops has encouraged this process – incremental promotions could only be found between companies, seldom within a single one.

Some people support and some people dispute the idea that there is value, or significant value, to be had by changing companies.  The idea is that by moving between environments you will glean techniques, procedures, processes and general experience that you will then bring with you to your next position – that you are a cumulative product of all of your past environments.  This concept, I believe, has some merit, moreso in technology than in other fields.

In technology fields, I believe that the value of moving between jobs, after a reasonable amount of time, is generally of much better value than is staying put.  The reason for this is relatively simple: Most small businesses lack an ecosystem of support and training for IT professionals. It is well known that IT professionals, working in small shops, lack the interaction with peers and vendors generally accepted as necessary for healthy professional development and which is common in enterprise shops.

An IT professional, after spending many years in a small shop, effectively all alone, tends to feel isolated lacking the professional interaction that most specialists enjoy.  Most small professional or artisan shops have a number of specialists who work together, share research and experience, are encouraged to work with competitors or vendors, to attend trade events, training, etc.  Few fields share the odd dispersion of IT professionals with only one or two people working together at any given company with little to no interaction with the outside world or with peers at other companies.

This isolation can lead to “IT insanity” if left unchecked.  An IT professional, working in a vacuum with little to no technical or professional feedback, will lose the ability to assess themselves against other professionals.  As often the sole provider of technology guidance and policy for potentially years or even decades, a lone IT professional can easily “drift off course” and lose contact and course correction from the larger IT field with only light guidance offered through the filtered world of vendors attempting to sell expensive products and services.

IT professionals suffering from “IT insanity” will often be found implementing bizarre, nonsensical policies that would never be tolerated in a shop with a strong peer-review mechanism, purchasing incredibly overpriced solutions for simple problems and working either completely with or completely without mainstream technologies – mostly dependent upon individual personality.  Partially this is caused by an increasing dependence on a singular, established skill set as the lack of environmental change encourages a process of continuing dependence on existing skills and procedures.

IT insanity will commonly arise in IT shops that have only a single IT professional or in shops where there is a strict hierarchy with no movement at the management ranks so that fresh ideas and experience from younger professionals do not feed up into the managers and instead established practices and “because I said so” policies are forced down the chain to the technologists actually implementing solutions.

This is not to say that all is lost.  There are steps that can be taken to avoid this scenario.  The first is to consider outsourcing IT – any shop so small as to face this dilemma should seriously consider if having full time, dedicated internal staff makes sense in their environment.  Looking for fresh blood is an option – getting IT professionals from other shops and even other industries can work wonders.  Some shops will even trade staff back and forth in extreme cases to keep from losing existing employees but seeking to “mix things up.”

Short of drastic measures such as changing employees entirely, non-IT organizations need to think seriously about the professional health of their staff and look to opportunities for peer interaction.  IT professionals need continuous professional interaction for many reasons and organizations need to actively support and promote this behavior.  Sending staff to training, seminars, peer groups, conventions, shows or even out as volunteers to non-profit and community activities where they can provide IT support in an alternative environment can do wonder for getting them out of the office and face to face with alternative viewpoints and get their hands on different technologies than they see in their day to day lives.

IT managers need opportunities to explore different solution sets and to learn what others are doing in order to best be able to offer objective, broad-based decision making value to their own organizations.

The IT world loves to swing back and forth between moving processing out to the user via fat clients and moving processing back to the server leaving users with thin clients.  The battle is a long running one that started with the first appearance of multiuser computer systems several decades ago and has continued to this day and will likely continue for a very long time to come.

When I began working in IT, thin clients were simple text terminals attached to a single, central server via serial connections.  Limited to very basic text input these served their purpose at the time to provide relatively low cost computing to a large number of users.  The system wasn’t pretty or glamorous, but it was quite functional.

These ancient terminals gave way to the personal computer and computing power shifted from the datacenter to the desktop allowing users to run powerful apps like Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect.  Responsive graphical applications were a powerful draw for decentralized processing.  Users were enthralled with the new usability.  The text terminal went into very rapid decline.

Eventually centralized power was available in such quantities and at such a low price point that graphical applications could be run with almost as much responsiveness from the server while clients could be “thin” needing just a shim of an operating system – enough to provide remote access back to the server.  Thin computing became the darling of the industry again and the term itself arose and moving towards centralized processing again came into vogue.

Administrators love the central computing model because data and configuration remains in one place.  Backups and management are a breeze.  The idea, at least in theory, is that in doing so desktop support becomes a non-issue with all desktop clients being nothing more than commodity components that can be replaced anytime with completely interchangeable parts.  Since nothing is stored or configured on the desktop there is nothing to support there.

In the initial swings of the “thin computing pendulum” the market movement was dramatic.  When text terminal computing first became available this was practically the only model used in the real world.  The value was so dramatic that no one could really justify doing anything else.  When the PC was introduced the movement to the fat client was so ubiquitous that many younger IT professionals today have never actually seen text terminals in use even though the move to fat “PC” clients was not as all encompassing as the move to text terminals had been one pendulum swing previous.

The PC model was generally better for end users because it mimicked how they used computers at home – those that had computers at home.  It also gave them more options for customization and, for better or for worse, opportunity for them to begin installing software of their own rather than only that software preconfigured for them on the central server.

Over time there have been a lot of developments from both camps giving each more and more advantages of the other.  Central domain services such as Microsoft’s Active Directory have come along allowing central management to extend out to fat clients bringing control and management more in line with traditional thin computing models.  Likewise, companies like Citrix have worked very hard developing new technologies that allow thin clients to perform much more like robust fat clients making their use as seamless as possible for end users and even making offline use possible for laptop users.

Most shops today have adopted hybrid models.  Fat clients where they make sense and thin clients for certain categories of users and for remote workers and continuity of business scenarios.

Over the past decade we have seen a shift in the way that business applications are created and deployed.  Today almost all business applications are web-based and have no client platform dependency.  This affords IT departments of today with a potential new opportunity – to shift from a traditional thin client platform – that requires remote graphical access – to the browser as the new thin client platform.

The move to web apps has happened slowly and most businesses have a rather large legacy codebase on which they are quite dependent that cannot be easily transferred to the new web app architecture and some apps simply are not good candidates for this architecture.  But by and large the majority of new business applications are web based, written most often in Java or .NET, and these apps are prime candidates for a new thin computing model.

If our custom business apps are available via the browser then our only commonly used apps that remain holding us back are the traditional productivity apps such as our office suites that are widely used by nearly all staff today (if they have a computer at all.)  Very few desktop apps are actually pervasive except for these.  Increasingly we are seeing browser-based alternatives to the traditional office suites.  Everyone is very aware of Google Apps as a pioneer in this area with Microsoft now offering online MS Office as well.  But the popular offerings making consumer news headlines require businesses to totally rethink long term strategies involving keeping critical business data within their walls and are not likely to be highly disruptive to the enterprise for quite some time.

What does pose a threat to the status quo is other alternative software products such as ThinkFree office which is installed within the organization and used and secured internally just like any other normal business application.  This category of “traditionally installed internal web applications” will allow enterprise IT departments to begin to reconsider their end users’ platforms without having to reevaluate their entire concept of IT in general.  The biggest barriers to this today are lingering business applications and power users using specific desktop apps that cannot be encapsulated within a browser.

One of the great advantages, however, of the browser as the new thin client is how simple it is to mix browser-based apps with traditional apps.  The move is transparent and most large businesses are moving in this direction today even if there is no overarching strategy to do so.  The market momentum to develop all new apps for the web is causing this to happen naturally.

Another key advantage of a completely “web based” architectural model is the great ease with which it can be exposed for users outside of the corporate network.  Instead of using cumbersome VPN clients and company laptops employees can find any web browser, sign in to the company network and have secure business applications delivered to any browser, anywhere.

Bringing this almost unnoticed shift into sharp relief today are a handful of, of all things, consumer devices such as: Apple’s iPhone and iPad and Google’s Android and ChromeOS platforms.  What all of these devices have in common is a focus upon being primarily thin web appliances – thin clients for consumers.  With the majority of consumer computing focused upon web connectivity the need for anything else from a platform is nearly non-existent in the consumer market.  This means that within a very short period of time users who once brought home PC experience to the office as their expectation of a computing environment will soon be beginning to bring web-based thin computing as their new expectation.

When this shift happens IT departments with need to rethink their internal application delivery strategy.  The change doesn’t have to be dramatic if current development trends are used commonly and legacy systems are routinely updated.  In fact, one of the great benefits of this new model is that traditional fat clients function very well as browser platforms and will do so for a very long time to come most likely.  Companies adopting this model will likely be able to slow desktop purchasing cycles and prepare for purchasing some form of traditional thin client with embedded browser or move to a business version of the new Nettop trend that we are beginning to see emerge in the consumer space.  Some businesses may even attempt the rather dangerous path of using consumer devices but the lack of management and security features will likely keep this from being popular in all but rare instances.

I believe, though, that this swing of the pendulum will not be as dramatic as the last one just as it was not as dramatic as the swing before that.  It will be an important trend but IT departments understand more and more that no new technological shift is a silver bullet and that with each new opportunity comes new challenges.  Most IT departments will need to implement some degree of browser-based thin computing over the next few years but most will retain a majority user base of fat clients.  Hybrid environments, like we’ve seen for many years with more traditional models, will continue as before with each technology being used in target areas where they make the most sense.

The one area where thin clients continue to be challenged the most is in mobile computing where disconnected users end up being digitally marooned away from their company networks unable to continue working until network connectivity is reestablished.  This is a significant issue for power users who must travel extensively and need to be able to continue working regardless of their current connectivity.  Today this is being solved in the traditional thin client arena thanks to companies like Citrix who continue to advance the state of the art in thin application delivery.

In the browser-based arena we have had to turn to technologies like Google Gears and Adobe AIR in the past to make this possible but these had poor market penetration.  Coming down the pike, however, is the new HTML 5 Offline API which is set to redefine how the web works for users who need to go “off the grid” from time to time.  With HTML 5 incorporating offline capabilities and a richer feature set into the specification for the web itself we expect to see broad and rapid adoption from all of the leading vendors – most likely even before the draft standard is finalized.  While still quite some ways away this new standard will certainly lay the groundwork for a significant shift towards the browser as a ubiquitous, standard and robust platform.

The future of thin computing looks to be incredibly promising both in the enterprise as well as, for the first time, in the consumer arena as well.  Adoption of thin computing models will be spurred on by the current movement towards Software as a Service models and SaaS adoption will continue to be encouraged by the widespread presence of thin computing devices.  In many ways browser-based thin computing represents the technology aspect that is now maturing in the SaaS arena where SaaS itself is maturing in social acceptance rather than technical feasibility.

If you talk to email specialists what you seem to find, in my small, anecdotal survey of the market, is that half of all of these professionals will tell you to simply install email locally, normally Microsoft Exchange, and the other half will simply tell you to go with a hosted (a.k.a. Software-as-a-Service / SaaS or “in the cloud”) service, most often Google Apps, but email is not such a simple architectural component that it should be distilled to trite answers.  Email is one of the most important components of your business’ communications infrastructure, often surpassing telephony, and choosing the right delivery methodology for your company is critical for your long term success.

We will start by considering some basic factors in email hosting.  Email systems require a good deal of bandwidth, quite a significant amount of storage, high reliability, careful management and significant security consideration.

Bandwidth is the first area to consider.  Every email sent and received must travel between the end user and the email server as well as between the email server itself and the outside world in the case of email destined externally.  In small businesses nearly all email is destined to leave the company network to go to clients, customers, vendors, etc.  In larger enterprises email use changes and as we approach the Fortune 100 email shifts from being almost exclusively a tool for communicating with people outside the organization to being a platform primarily used for internal communications.

This shift in how email itself is used is a very important factor in deciding how to deploy email services.  If email is used almost exclusively internally for intra-staff communications then this will lend itself very well to hosting email systems in-house to increase security and improve WAN bandwidth utilization.  The caveat here being, of course, that a highly distributed company of any size would not keep this traffic on a LAN network and so should be treated as if the email usage is external regardless of whether or not it is intra-staff.  Small companies with communications happening primarily with external users will find better utilization in a hosted service.

Storage is actually often a smaller factor in email architecture decision making than it may at first appear that it should be.  Traditionally email’s storage requirements made a compelling argument for hosting internally due to the cost benefit of keeping large storage, especially that used for archival needs, local.  Recently, large hosted email vendors such as Rackspace and Google Apps have brought the price of online, archival email storage so low that, in many cases, it may actually be more cost effective to utilize hosted storage rather than local storage or, at least, the cost is at parity.  Even long term archival storage can be had very cost effectively in a hosted solution today.

Reliability is a rather complex subject.  Email is critical to any organization.  If an email system goes down many companies simply grind to a halt.  In some cases, the company effectively shuts down when email stops flowing.  Not only do employees stop communicating with each other but customers, vendors, suppliers and others see the company as being offline at best and out of business at worst.  Interrupting communications with the outside world can represent immediate and serious financial impact to almost any business.

Hosted email has the obvious advantage of being hosted in a large, commercial datacenter with redundancy at every level (assuming a top tier vendor) from hardware to storage to networking to power to support.  Hosting email in house requires a business to determine the level of redundancy that is most cost effective given the business’ ability to withstand email downtime and is generally an exercise in compromises – how much reliability can a company do without given the cost necessary to provide it.

Some companies will opt to host email servers at a colocation facility which will provide them with many redundant components but to meet the features of a Rackspace or Google level offering, multiple datacenters would likely be needed.  Colocation is a halfway option providing the technical features of hosted options with the management and flexibility of in-house email systems.

A more common scenario, though, is for companies to host a single email server completely within their walls relying on their internal power, hardware and network connection.  In a scenario like this a company must either take extreme measures to ensure uptime – such as hosting a completely redundant site at immense cost – or front-ending their entire email infrastructure with a reliable online spooling service such as Postini, MessageLabs or MXLogic.  The cost of such services, while critical for the reliability most companies need, is often equal to or even greater than complete email hosting options.  This spooling service cost will likely add an ongoing, scaling cost that will make fully hosted email services always a less expensive option than in-house hosting.

Management cost is very difficult to determine but requires attention.  A fully hosted solution requires relatively little technical knowledge.  Time to manage is low and the skill level necessary to do so is relatively low.  With an in-house solution your company must supply infrastructure, networking, security, system and email skills.  Depending on your needs and your available staff this may be part time for a single professional or it may require multiple FTEs or even outside consultants.  The total time necessary to manage an in-house email system will vary dramatically and is often very hard to calculate do the complex nature of the situation but, at a minimum, it is orders of magnitude greater than a hosted solution.

Security is the final significant consideration.  Beyond traditional system-level security email requires spam filtering.  Handling spam can be done in many ways: in software on the email server, on an appliance located on the local network, farmed out to a spam filtering service or left to the hosted email solution provider.  Spam filtering, if handled internally, is seldom a set and forget service but one that requires regular attention and generally extra cost in licensing and management.

After looking at these main considerations every company should sit down, crunch the numbers, and determine which solution makes the most sense for them on an individual level.  Often it is necessary to use a spreadsheet and play with several scenarios to see what each solution will cost both up front and over time.  This, combined with a valuation of features and their applicability to the company, will be critical in determining the appropriateness of each option.

The secret weapons of the in-house solution are features, integration and flexibility.  In-house email options can be extended or modified to offer exactly the feature set that the organization requires – sometimes at additional cost.  A perfect example of this is Zimbra’s instant messaging integration which can be a significant value-add for an email platform.  This has to be considered in addition to raw cost.  Integration with existing internal authentication mechanisms can be an important factor as well.

In my own experience and cost calculations, hosted solutions represent the vast majority of appropriate solutions in the SMB space due to raw economics while large and enterprise class customers will find insurmountable benefits from the flexibility and internal communications advantages of in-house solutions.  Small businesses struggle mostly with cost while large business struggle primarily with the communications complexity of their scale.  Large businesses also get the best value from in-house solutions due to “professional density” – the inverse number of IT professionals whose time is wasted due to corporate scale inefficiencies.

Today, whether a business chooses to host their own email or to receive email as a service, there are many options from which to choose even once a basic architecture is chosen.  Traditionally only a few in-house options such as MS Exchange and Lotus Notes would be considered but new alternatives such as Zimbra (recently acquired by VMWare,) Scalix and Kerio are expanding the landscape with lower costs, new deployment options and aggressive feature sets.  Hosting’s relative newcomer, and overnight industry heavyweight, Rackspace is drawing a lot of attention with their new email offerings which more closely mimic traditional in-house offerings while Google continues to get attention with their unique GMail services.  I expect to see the hosted email space continue to become more competitive with new integration features being a key focus.

Every business is unique and the whole of the factors must be considered.  Using a combination of business and IT skills is necessary to evaluate the available options and opportunities and no one discipline should be making these decisions in isolation.  This is a perfect example of where IT managers must understand the economics of the business in addition to the technological aspects of the solution.

As more and more businesses begin to deploy virtualization broadly, we must begin to step back and reconsider the opportunities presented to us by this shift in datacenter architecture.  Virtualization comes with new challenges and potential not only for cost savings but for aggressive project implementation.  Small businesses, especially, when using virtualization tend to prepare themselves for projects that they could never have envisioned doing during the era of physical-only servers.

The big winners in this space of emerging virtualization opportunity are the open source operating systems such as Linux, OpenSolaris and FreeBSD.  The reason that these particular operating systems have unique opportunities that Windows and Mac OSX do not is because of the way that they are, or can be, licensed.  Each of these operating systems has an option by which they are available completely for free – something that cannot be done with Windows or Mac OSX.

Traditionally, when purchasing a new server a business would price out expensive hardware with relatively inexpensive software.  An enterprise operating system, such as Windows, would typically represent a relatively small percentage of the cost of a new server.  Even a small server would cost a few thousand dollars and Windows Server can easily be purchased for less than one thousand dollars.  In this scenario a business looking to purchase a new server would see only a very small cost savings in opting for a “free” operating system since introducing a new OS has its own risks and the bulk of the cost of the new server is in the hardware which would still need to be purchased.

Given that equation, only a rare small business would consider the purchase of a non-Windows-based server.  The opportunity for failure is too high given the risk of change and the cost savings are too small.  Today, though, virtualization is commonplace and becoming more ubiquitous every day.  Businesses virtualizing their infrastructure typically have excess capacity on their servers that is going unused.  As these businesses and their IT departments begin to look to utilize this spare capacity they will increasingly find that the cost of deploying virtualized Windows Server remains high while the cost of deploying a virtualized Linux or OpenSolaris server is nominal – generally nothing more than the effort to do so without any capital expenditure or its associated risk.

The ability to deploy new servers, at any time, without any cost is a significant advantage that companies have not begun to truly comprehend.  If a business wants a new web server, for instance, they can have one provisioned and built in thirty minutes without buying any licenses.  Having redundant virtualization hardware means that a redundant web server can be had as well – again without any capital cost.  Unlike Windows (or other commercial operating systems) there is no need to purchase a second license just to have a backup server.

This means that for the first time many businesses can begin to consider clusters as well.  Typically the cost of licensing software for clustering was prohibitive but if that licensing becomes free then suddenly clusters become very attractive options.

Of course, as open source proponents will point out, the low cost of Linux and other free and open source solutions have long been reasons to move to these platforms, but this discounts the incredible shift in pricing structure that occurs only when spare usable capacity meets the previously existing free licenses.  It is only because so many business have already implemented virtualization strategies, or are in the process of doing so, that this new opportunity truly presents itself.

The first challenge will be in getting businesses to begin to think of operating systems and application platforms as being free.  The ways in which businesses may take advantage of this has yet to be seen.  Businesses are so used to being hamstrung by the need to buy new hardware and expensive server software licenses for every new system deployment that the widespread availability of spare server images is quite novel indeed.

Of course, as with many new technology changes, it is the small and medium business space where the greatest change will likely take place.  Large enterprises are already doing datacenter consolidation and do not necessarily have spare capacity available to them as their capacity plan already takes into account virtualization.  But in the smaller business space where capacity planning is a practically non-existent practice we see a different type of opportunity.

What we typically see in small businesses moving to virtualization is an over-purchasing of hardware.  This generally comes from a misunderstanding of how capacity planning and virtual guest interaction will occur in the virtualized environment but also from a desire to err on the side of overpowered versus underpowered and the nature of virtualization capacity planning being a bit of a “black art”.  Because of this, however, many small businesses have server resources sitting idle.  It is not uncommon to see a powerful server virtualizing just two server instances when there is capacity to virtualize a dozen or more.

It is this overprovisioning of hardware that offers unique opportunity.  Many small businesses, and even medium sized businesses, may manage to effectively virtualize their entire existing server infrastructure leaving no further opportunity for cost savings through consolidation.  At this point the spare capacity of the existing servers offers no further cost savings and can now be viewed as capacity for growth instead.

This begs the question of “What new deployment opportunities exist given these opportunities?”  This question is difficult to answer as it will be different for nearly every business, but we can look at some commonalities to build a rough picture of where we may see new value presenting itself.

The most obvious new opportunity is in new web applications.  Small businesses often would like to take advantage of free web-based applications but do not want to risk deploying new, low-priority applications to their existing Windows-based web server of do not even have a server available to do so.  Creating one or more open source application servers is incredibly simple.  Deploying a wiki, corporate web portal, a blogging engine or news site, bug or incident tracking application, microblogging platform (a la laconi.ca,) CRM, ERP or any of thousands of similar applications can be done quickly and easily with minimal cost using only “spare” time from the existing IT resources.  Any number of internal applications such as these could bring value to the company and produce very little impact on a virtualization platform so many could be deployed utilizing only a small amount of excess capacity.

Beyond obvious web apps there are more feature-rich systems that could be deployed for no cost.  A great example is the OpenFire instant messaging and presence server.  Companies can suddenly roll out complete enterprise class, secure, internal instant messaging applications at no cost whatsoever.  Another example is in monitoring systems such as Nagios, Zenoss or Zabbix – all of which are available for free and represent a real benefit for companies that currently have no such system.  Enterprise monitoring completely for free.

Beyond new applications there is also an “environmental” benefit to be had.  In an enterprise environment changes going into production go through a series of testing.  Typically big businesses will maintain a development server environment, a user acceptance testing environment and then the production environment.  For a small business to do this with Windows is extremely cost prohibitive as the servers in each environment need to be licensed.  But with open source servers being virtualized using spare capacity deploying virtual servers for each of these environments is completely free and allows small businesses to test their own processes before making production changes giving them added stability previously unaffordable to them.

After all of these growth benefits there is one additional benefit to consider – flexibility.  Because these new systems can be deployed and tested with no cost it provides a new opportunity for small shops to deploy open source solutions that may replace expensive Windows solutions that they are currently using.  This could include replacing Exchange with Zimbra or replacing IIS with Apache or Active Directory with an LDAP server.  Doing a project like this would be risky and potentially costly if the hardware and software had to be purchased up front.  But if the project can be done, only using free time from the existing IT department, and can be done as a free “proof of concept” before looking to do a pilot and then full production replacement then risk can be minimized and the entire project can be effectively free.

While a full architectural replacement may be very aggressive for an average small business it is also a very significant potential cost savings.  Moving completely to open source systems is not for everyone and should be evaluated carefully.  The ability to evaluate a project of this magnitude, for free, is very important and small businesses should consider doing so to be sure that they are using the systems that make the most sense for their business model and needs rather than simply using the solutions with which they are already familiar or are already in place.

There are many additional ways in which free and open source products, deployed using existing, excess server capacity, can be used to expand the IT infrastructure of small businesses.  Learning to seek out opportunities rather than seeking cost savings from IT is a new process for most small businesses and requires some relearning, but those that take the time to pursue these opportunities have many benefits to be gained.

In small businesses the primary concern with email is cost.  Email is a commodity and especially in smaller shops the biggest differentiating factor between email products and vendors is cost.  In larger companies factors beyond cost begin to come into play more significantly such as directory services, system integration, push email, extended client support, collaboration tools, presence and more.

Surprisingly, when small businesses decide to bring their email in-house they seem to immediately turn to Microsoft Exchange.  Now I don’t want to belittle Exchange’s place in the market.  Exchange is an extremely robust and feature rich product that has earned its reputation as the go-to enterprise collaboration and messaging server.  In the last decade Exchange came seemingly from nowhere to completely dominate the large business email market.  People simply assume that you run Exchange in the Fortune 500 and, for the most part, they are correct.

The features for which Exchange is best known, however, are not features often critical or even useful to small businesses.  In actuality, the weight of Exchange – necessary to support so many great big-business features – can make it unwieldy for small businesses – even for those businesses with the financial and technological resources to support it.  Exchange focuses on collaboration and internal team communications.

Exchange brings with it many burdens.  The first being cost, up front purchasing, licensing and ongoing support.  Up front costs of Exchange include the Exchange email server purchase plus the licenses necessary for the Windows Servers – yes, that is multiple servers – on which it runs.  (Yes, you can mitigate some of this cost by purchasing Microsoft’s Small Business Server which integrates these components together but extra costs remain and flexibility is lost.)  Licensing costs for Exchange include needed Windows Server CALs and Exchange Email CALs for every user, and in some case fictional user accounts, who will need to access the system.  Ongoing support cost comes from the extra complexity arising from Exchange’s complex feature set and deployment architecture.

The second set of burdens with Exchange comes from the user interface, namely Outlook.  Now technically Exchange requires no additional user interface as Outlook Web Access, or OWA, is included for free and is a very functional web interface for email.  This would be fine if all of Exchange’s functionality was exposed through OWA, but this is not the case, so this is often nothing more than a decent fall-back solution for remote users who are away from their corporate laptops.  To really achieve the benefits of Exchange a company needs to invest in Microsoft Outlook which is a very robust and powerful email and collaboration platform but also an expensive one.  The per-user cost of Outlook can be quite significant when added to the per user costs already existing from the Exchange licensing.

The third set of burdens comes from the overhead of managing such a complex and powerful beast as Exchange.  Exchange is no simple system and, when secured according to best practices, spans multiple physical servers and operates in multiple roles.  Exchange system administration is considered its own discipline within IT or, at least, a Windows Server specialty.  Qualified Exchange admins are costly and in-demand from big business.  Small businesses looking to acquire good Exchange talent will either be paying top dollar, hiring consultants or attempting to make do with less experienced staff – a potential disaster on such a critical and publicly exposed system.  In addition to managing the Exchange system itself the staff will also need to contend with managing the deployment and maintenance of the Outlook clients which, while not complicated, does increase the burden on the IT department compared to other solutions.

More potential cost comes from the need to supply anti-virus technologies and anti-spam technologies to support the Exchange installation.  It would be unfair to mention AV and AS technologies in relation to Exchange without pointing out that any in-house email system will absolutely need these technologies as well – these costs are certainly not unique to Exchange.  However, the ecosystem surrounding Exchange has a very strong tendency to encourage the use of expensive, commercial third party tools to meet these needs.  Outside of Exchange, AV and AS technologies are often included with the email packages and no further purchases are needed.

Vying for attention in the Exchange-alternative space are open source entries Zimbra and Scalix as well as several commercial products such as IBM’s Lotus Notes, Novell’s Groupwise, Open-Xchange and Kerio’s MailServer.  Of these, Lotus Notes and Groupwise target, primarily, the large business space bringing their own set of complex collaboration functionality and cost.  The other four, Zimbra, Scalix, Open-Xchange and Kerio MailServer, focus primarily on the small business space and bring leaner, more targeted solutions that will more likely fit the profile desired for a majority of small businesses who are looking to bring their email solution in-house.

Over the last few years Zimbra especially has been in the news with their advanced web interface and early sale to Yahoo! and very recent acquisition by VMWare.  Zimbra has led, at least in the media, the charge of alternative vendors looking to open the in-house email market.  What makes these products stand out is that they deliver the bulk of Exchange’s enterprise level features, including calendaring and other important corporate applications, but do so either for free or at very competitive prices and through robust web interfaces removing the need for a local fat client like Outlook (but while maintaining the option.)

Zimbra and Scalix truly stand out as ideal candidates for the majority of small businesses looking to keep their email in-house.  Both Zimbra and Scalix offer a wide range of functionality, robust AJAX-based web interface, large commercial installation bases, broad industry support and offer the paid option of full vendor support.  But the biggest benefit for many small businesses is that these packages are available in completely free editions allowing an SMB on a budget to rely completely upon their internal IT department or their IT vendor for support rather than buying expensive, per-user email system licenses.

In addition to being free themselves, Zimbra and Scalix offer a range of deployment scenarios including Red Hat Linux, and its free alternative CentOS Linux, as well as Novell’s Suse Linux. By being available on these platforms these vendors again lower the cost of deploying their solutions as no Windows Server license is required to support them.  This is a large potential cost savings over Exchange again as Exchange requires not one but at least two Windows Server licenses on which to run.  Linux also brings some cost and performance advantages in the virtualization space with more and more varied virtualization options compared to most other platforms.

Caveats exist, of course.  Many shops are wary when looking at non-Microsoft solutions.  A lack of skilled Linux technicians in the SMB space is of real concern.  Windows Admins are abundant and it is a rare shop who would need to even seek one out let alone fail to find one capable of supporting their systems.  While Linux Admins are hardly found by swinging cats, they are widely available and tend to be on average, in my opinion,  more skilled – if only because there is a smaller, more senior pool of people from whom to draw talent.  This helps to balance the equation making Linux support not nearly as scary as it may seem like it will be for small businesses, but it does mean that most SMBs will have to look to more experienced IT consulting firms to assist them – which can bring long term cost benefits as well.

Many users are addicted to the functionality and interfaces of Exchange.  This can be a significant factor in deciding to try an alternative product.  Once workers have become accustomed to their existing workflows and processes, changing them by replacing their email server architecture can be rather disruptive.  Exchange offers quite an extensive array of functionality and users who are using those functions, not handled by competing products, will not likely be pleased losing those features, even if there are alternatives available.  So knowing your userbase and what features are being used is important.  Many companies never touch these features and can migrate easily.

Zimbra and Scalix bring their own features, of course.  One of the best being Zimbra’s built-in instant messaging system and presence system built using the standard XMPP protocol.  Putting secure instant messaging directly into the email interface is a huge win for Zimbra and a significant value-add over the status quo.

Obviously the ideal time to consider an alternative email product is at the very beginning when email is first being deployed or when a migration from another system is already underway.  But even companies with existing email systems can seek cost benefits by moving to a less costly system with savings being recouped over a longer period of time and more work necessary to train users.

Small businesses should look first to products like Zimbra and Scalix as the de facto choice for their environments and heavier, more expensive products like Microsoft Exchange should be considered a “special case” choice that requires careful cost analysis and justification.  Far too many SMB IT departments are picking the expensive route without being required to justify their actions.  If more small businesses were diligent about monitoring their IT spending they would likely find many places where their money is not only being spent somewhat liberally but sometimes even for features that they cannot use at all and sometimes on systems that carry many long term support costs as well.

Back when I was a novice service tech and barely knew anything about system administration one of the few topics that we were always expected to know cold was RAID -  Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.  It was the answer to all of our storage woes.  With RAID we could scale our filesystems larger, get better throughput and even add redundancy allowing us to survive the loss of a disk which, especially in those days, happened pretty regularly.  With the rise of NAS and SAN storage appliances the skill set of getting down to the physical storage level and tweaking it to meet the needs of the system in question are rapidly disappearing.  This is not a good thing.  Just because we are offloading storage to external devices does not change the fact that we need to fundamentally understand our storage and configure it to meet the specific needs of our systems.

A misconception that seems to have entered the field over the last five to ten years is the belief that RAID somehow represents a system backup.  It does not.  RAID is a form of fault tolerance.  Backup and fault tolerance are very different conceptually.  Backup is designed to allow you to recover after a disaster has occurred.  Fault tolerance is designed to lessen the chance of disaster.  Think of fault tolerance as building a fence at the top of a cliff and backup as building a hospital at the bottom of it.  You never really want to be in a situation without a both a fence and a hospital, but they are definitely different things.

Once we are implementing RAID for our drives, whether locally attached or on a remote appliance like SAN, we have four key RAID solutions from which to choose today for business: RAID 1 (mirroring), RAID 5 (striping with parity), RAID 6 (striping with double parity) and RAID 10 (mirroring with striping.)  There are others, like RAID 0, that only should be used in rare circumstances when you really understand your drive subsystem needs.  RAID 50 and 51 are used as well but far less commonly and are not nearly as effective.  Ten years ago RAID 1 and RAID 5 were common, but today we have more options.

Let’s step through the options and discuss some basic numbers.  In our examples we will use n to represent the number of drives in our array and we will use s to represent the size of any individual drive.  Using these we can express the usable storage space of an array making comparisons easy in terms of storage capacity.

RAID 1: In this RAID type drives are mirrored.  You have two drives and they do everything together at the same time, hence “mirroring”.  Mirroring is extremely stable as the process is so simple, but it requires you to purchase twice as many drives as you would need if you were not using RAID at all as your second drive is dedicated to redundancy.  The benefit being that you have the assurance that every bit that you write to disk is being written twice for your protection.  So with RAID 1 our capacity is calculated to be (n*s/2).  RAID 1 suffers from providing minimal performance gains over non-RAID drives.  Write speeds are equivalent to a non-RAID system while read speeds are almost twice as fast in most situations since during read operations the drives can access in parallel to increase throughput.  RAID 1 is limited to two drive sets.

RAID 5: Striping with Single Parity, in this RAID type data is written in a complex stripe across all drives in the array with a distributed parity block that exists across all of the drives.  By doing this RAID 5 is able to use an arbitrarily sized array of three or more disks and only loses the storage capacity equivalent to a single disk to parity although the parity is distributed and does not exist solely on any one physical disk.   RAID 5 is often used because of its cost effectiveness due to its lack of storage capacity loss in large arrays.  Unlike mirroring, striping with parity requires that a calculation be performed for each write stripe across the disks and this creates some overhead.  Therefore the throughput is not always an obvious calculation and is dependent heavily upon the computational power of the system doing the parity calculation.  Calculating RAID 5 capacity is quite easy as it is simply ((n-1)*s).  A RAID 5 array can survive the loss of any single disk in the array.

RAID 6: Redundant Striping with Double Parity.  RAID 6 is practically identical to RAID 5 but uses two parity blocks per stripe rather than one to allow for additional protection against disk failure.  RAID 6 is a newer member of the RAID family having been added several years after the other levels had become standardized.  RAID 6 is special in that it allows for the failure of any two drives within an array without suffering data loss.  But to accommodate the additional level of redundancy a RAID 6 array loses the storage capacity of the equivalent to two drives in the array and requires a minimum of four drives.  We can calculate the capacity of a RAID 6 array with ((n-2)*s).

RAID 10: Mirroring plus Striping.  Technically RAID 10 is a hybrid RAID type encompassing a set of RAID 1 mirrors existing in a non-parity stripe (RAID 0).  Many vendors use the term RAID 10 (or RAID 1+0) when speaking of only two drives in an array but technically that is RAID 1 as striping cannot occur until there are a minimum of four drives in the array.  With RAID 10 drives must be added in pairs so only an even number of drives can exist in an array.  RAID 10 can survive the loss of up to half of the total set of drives but a maximum loss of one from each pair.  RAID 10 does not involve a parity calculation giving it a performance advantage over RAID 5 or RAID 6 and requiring less computational power to drive the array.  RAID 10 delivers the greatest read performance of any common RAID type as all drives in the array can be used simultaneously in read operations although its write performance is much lower.  RAID 10′s capacity calculation is identical to that of RAID 1, (n*s/2).

In today’s enterprise it is rare for an IT department to have a serious need to consider any drive configuration outside of the four mentioned here regardless of whether software or hardware RAID is being implemented.  Traditionally the largest concern in a RAID array decision was based around usable capacity.  This was because drives were expensive and small.  Today drives are so large that storage capacity is rarely an issue, at least not like it was just a few years ago, and the costs have fallen such that purchasing additional drives necessary for better drive redundancy is generally of minor concern.  When capacity is at a premium RAID 5 is a popular choice because it loses the least storage capacity compared to other array types and in large arrays the storage loss is nominal.

Today we generally have other concerns, primarily data safety and performance.  Spending a little extra to ensure data protection should be an obvious choice.  RAID 5 suffers from being able to lose only a single drive.  In an array of just three members this is only slightly more dangerous than the protection offered by RAID 1.  We could survive the loss of any one out of three drives.  Not too scary compared to losing either of two drives.  But what about a large array, say sixteen drives.  Being able to safely lose only one of sixteen drives should make us question our reliability a little more thoroughly.

This is where RAID 6 stepped in to fill the gap.  RAID 6, when used in a large array, introduces a very small loss of storage capacity and performance while providing the assurance of being able to lose any two drives.  Proponents of the striping with parity camp will often quote these numbers to assuage management that RAID 5/6 can provide adequate “bang for the buck” in storage subsystems, but there are other factors at play.

Almost entirely overlooked in discussions of RAID reliability, an all too seldom discussed topic as it is, is the question of parity computation reliability.  With RAID 1 or RAID 10 there is no “calculation” done to create a stripe with parity.  Data is simply written in a stable manner.  When a drive fails its partner picks up the load and drive performance is slightly degraded until the partner is replaced.  There is no rebuilding process that impacts existing drive members.  Not so with parity stripes.

RAID arrays with parity have operations that involve calculating what is and what should be on the drives.  While this calculation is very simple it provides an opportunity for things to go wrong.  An array control that fails with RAID 1 or RAID 10 could, in theory, write bad data over the contents of the drives but there is no process by which the controller makes drive changes on its own so this is extremely unlikely to ever occur as there is never a “rebuild” process except in creating a mirror.

When arrays with parity perform a rebuild operation they perform a complex process by which they step through the entire contents of the array and write missing data back to the replaced drive.  In and of itself this is relatively simple and should be no cause for worry.  What I and others have seen first hand is a slightly different scenario involving disks that have lost connectivity due to loose connectors to the array.  Drives can commonly “shake” loose over time as they sit in a server especially after several years of service in an always-on system.

What can happen, in extreme scenarios, is that good data on drives can be overwritten by bad parity data when an array controller believes that one or more drives have failed in succession and been brought back online for rebuild.  In this case the drives themselves have not failed and there is no data loss.  All that is required is that the drives be reseated, in theory.  On hot swap systems the management of drive rebuilding is often automatic based on the removal and replacement of a failed drive.  So this process of losing and replacing a drive may occur without any human intervention – and a rebuilding process can begin.  During this process the drive system is at risk and should this same event occur again the drive array may, based upon the status of the drives, begin striping bad data across the drives overwriting the good filesystem.  It is one of the most depressing sights for a server administrator to see when a system with no failed drives loses an entire array due to an unnecessary rebuild operation.

In theory this type of situation should not occur and safeguards are in place to protect against it but the determination of a low level drive controller as to the status of a drive currently and previously and the quality of the data residing upon that drive is not as simple as it may seem and it is possible for mistakes to occur.  While this situation is unlikely it does happen and it adds a nearly impossible to calculate risk to RAID 5 and RAID 6 systems.  We must consider the risk of parity failure in addition to the traditional risk calculated from the number of drive losses that an array can survive out of a pool.  As drives become more reliable the significance of the parity failure risk event becomes greater.

Additionally, RAID 5 and RAID 6 parity introduces system overhead due to parity calculation which is often handled by way of dedicated RAID hardware.  This calculation introduces latency into the drive subsystem that varies dramatically by implementation both in hardware and in software making it impossible to state performance numbers of RAID levels against one another as each implementation will be unique.

Possibly the biggest problem with RAID choices today is that the ease with which metrics for storage efficiency and drive loss survivability can be obtained mask the big picture of reliability and performance as those statistics are almost entirely unavailable.  One of the dangers of metrics is that people will focus upon factors that can be easily measured and ignore those that cannot be easy measured regardless of their potential for impact.

While all modern RAID levels have their place it is critical that they be considered within context and with an understanding as to the entire scope of the risks.  We should work hard to shift our industry from a default of RAID 5 to a default of RAID 10.  Drives are cheap and data loss is expensive.

In the last year or two we have seen virtualization go from a poorly understood concept to a much-hyped industry buzz word being bantered about constantly in every conversation involving technology.  There is no doubt that virtualization is playing an important role in today’s IT landscape, but the question we are asking is whether virtualization applies to the small and medium business markets at this time.

The quick answer to this question is: absolutely.  Unlike many technologies that are of questionable value or that provide a great degree of technological complication, risk and expense that may not be appropriate for a small business, virtualization is a mature technology (IBM CP/CMS circa 1968) that is well understood and provides a layer of hardware abstraction that can benefit an IT organization of any size and may possibly apply even more to the small business IT department than it applies in the enterprise space.

Before looking at how virtualization can benefit the SMB market I would like to provide some definitions to be sure that we are discussing the same set of technologies.  In today’s IT landscape it has become popular to relabel common technologies as “virtualization” for marketing reasons and this has unnecessarily complicated the issue.

True virtualization refers to the virtualizing of entire operating systems.  Wikipedia uses the term platform virtualization and I will as well.  Technically we could refer to this as “System Virtualization” or “Operating System Virtualization” to distinguish it from loosely-related technologies that may arguably have the right to also use the same general term.

The basic concept of platform virtualization involves running an abstraction layer on a computer that emulates the hardware itself. Through the combination of abstraction and emulation we get what is known as a virtual machine.  This virtual machine is a completely working “computer” onto which we can install an operating system just as if we were installing onto the bare metal of a dedicated machine.  Instead of being limited to only installing one operating system image per computer we can now, with platform virtualization, install many copies of the same or disparate operating systems onto the same piece of hardware.  A powerful concept indeed.

The obviousness of the utility of this technology begs the obvious question: “If platform virtualization has been available since 1968, why is it only becoming popular and important recently?”  This is an excellent question.  The answer is actually quite simple.

Traditional platform virtualization technologies require a lot of support within the computer hardware itself.  IBM has been building this type of support into its mainframe systems for decades and large UNIX vendors like Sun have been providing this in their high-end UNIX servers for years as well.  These systems are highly specialized and typically run their own custom operating system(s).  Generally only large IT shops could afford servers of this magnitude and small shops did not have ready access to these technologies.  For those IT professionals who have worked with this type of equipment in the past the idea of virtualization was often so ingrained into the platform that it was often discussed very little as it was seen as simply an aspect of these high-end server systems and not necessarily a concept in its own right.

What has changed recently is the move to bring platform virtualization to the commodity hardware space occupied by the AMD and Intel (x86_64) processors used by the majority of small and medium businesses as well as larger enterprises.  The first move was to use software alone to make this possible on the x86 processor family.  The early players in this space were VMWare and Microsoft with products like VMWare Workstation, Virtual PC, VMWare GSX and MS Virtual Server.  These products showed that no special hardware was needed to effectively virtualize whole operating systems and began to allow companies of all sizes to experiment with the concept of virtualizing their existing commodity platforms.  This form of virtualization is known as “host-based virtualization” as it requires a host operating system on which the virtualization environment will run.

Following on the tail of these software-only solutions the big processor vendors in the commodity space, AMD and Intel, began building virtualization capabilities into the processor allowing for more flexibility, security and performance and bringing the commodity x64 hardware market much more in line with the traditional offerings from the other processor families common in big iron servers.  By doing so the virtualization market has really exploded both from the vendor side as more and more vendors begin offering virtualization related products and from the customer side as virtualization begins to be better understood and its use becomes more commonplace.  With the latest rounds of purchasing most small IT shops have purchased servers, and often desktops, that support hardware-level virtualization even without intending to prepare themselves for a move to virtualization making the equation often tip in that direction naturally.  This hardware-supported virtualization model is called “hypervisor-based virtualization” as all operating systems run on top of a tiny kernel called the hypervisor and no traditional operating system runs directly on the hardware.

Now that we have a good idea of what platform virtualization is and why it is now available to us as an option we will look at why platform virtualization may be beneficial to us in the small and medium business space.

There are two things that we can readily virtualize (without getting esoteric or starting to virtualize our routing and switching infrastructure) – servers and desktops.  By far the easier and more obvious choice is the virtualization of servers.

Virtualizing the server infrastructure, or part of it, is the first place that most IT shops look today as a potential for virtualization.  Most companies find that the majority of their servers are extremely underutilized with excess CPU, memory and drive capacity sitting idle while additional workloads fail to find a home due to budget constraints, space or implementation time.  Virtualization to the rescue.

Through virtualization we have the opportunity to run several virtual servers on a single piece of server hardware.  We could virtualize just a single server system but this would not gain us any utilization advantages or we could, in theory, virtualize hundreds of servers if our hardware could handle it.  Typically, small businesses can virtualize several typical servers roles onto a single physical server.  Virtual machine density is, of course, determined by load characteristics as well as by the available hardware.  Virtualization uses a lot of memory and storage, obviously, and so careful planning must be made.  Memory and storage are relatively inexpensive today and are certainly vastly less expensive than purchasing additional server hardware and paying to support it.  It is not uncommon for a small business to easily virtualize half a dozen servers on a single piece of hardware at a minimum and a score or more is not an unreasonable number to hope to achieve.

Many small shops instantly jump to the conclusion that virtualization requires expensive SAN storage.  This is not the case at all.  Virtualization provides a range of benefits even without using a SAN storage infrastructure of which shops can take advantage immediately.  There are, of course, some significant advantages available by using SAN in conjunction with virtualization and high availability or load balancing technologies.  Often, though, these high availability and load balancing capabilities are additional features that did not exist prior to virtualization and are not necessary in order for a shop to see significant benefits from virtualization but do present an opportunity for future improvement when and if budgets allow.

Small businesses will see many advantages from virtualization immediately even doing so on a small scale.  Some of these benefits are obvious and some are less so.

Our first advantage is that of hardware cost as I mentioned above.  By eliminating the need to purchase and support expensive server hardware on a per operating system basis we can now deploy more systems at lower cost per system.  In many cases this is not only a cost savings but will also provide greater funds necessary to move from more spartan servers into fewer but more enterprise class offerings with important performance, stability and support features such as integrated power management and KVM over IP from an out of band management console.

Our second advantage is the cost savings from reducing power consumption.  It is very trendy, and for good reason, for companies to be concerned with how “green” they are today and IT virtualization plays a key role in the greenification of the department.  The addition of virtual machines onto a single physical server typically represents a trivial, if even measurable, increase in power draw.  Adding additional physical servers, of course, adds a significant amount of power consumption even for systems that are lightly used or used only occasionally.

Our third advantage is in reducing backup complexity.  Virtualized servers can be backed up using completely traditional methods such as file system level backups from the operating system itself as made popular by traditional backup systems like NetBackup, BackupExec, Amanda, Bacula and others.  So if we desire to stick with current backup strategies we can without any additional complexity, but if we want to move to image-based backups we can do so quite easily.  Using system images as backups is not necessarily new or unique to virtualization but virtualization makes this far more obvious and accessible for many users.  In fact, with virtualization system images (a copy of the entire system, not just of its individual files) can be taken using nothing but the regular filesystem – no special software needed.  A complete system backup can be taken by simply shutting down the virtual server, making a copy of its virtual filesystem – often a single, large file, and starting the system up again.  Restoring a system can be a simple as copying an image file from a backup storage device to the virtual server and starting it back up.  Restore done.  System back online.  This is as simple as it gets.

Our fourth advantage is in the ease of provisioning.  Building a new server operating system directly on hardware is a time consuming venture for most shops.  This is especially true if there are any surprises with new hardware type that has not been used previously.  There may be missing drivers or special operating system settings and parameters needed to support the hardware.  With virtualization the target platform is always identical removing many surprises from this process making it both faster and more reliable.  In many cases deployment is also faster simply because the process of preparing the base machine is so much faster.  To kick off a manual install of Linux on a traditional physical server I must purchase said server, install into rack, connect power and networking, provision networking, turn on server, update firmware, configure out of band management system, burn in hardware, install installation media and begin installing.  Or from some virtualization environments I can simply kick off the entire process with a single command at the command line.  Deploying a new server could go from hours or days to minutes.  This does not even begin to address the simplicity of cloning existing systems within a virtual environment.

A fifth “soft” advantage of virtualization is that there is quite often a significant software cost savings when virtualizing.  Some vendors, like Novell with Suse Linux, allow you to virtualize as many servers as you want on a single physical machine while paying for only a single machine license.  Red Hat gives you multiple installs but not unlimited like Novell.  Microsoft has a range of virtualization pricing options depending on your needs including an unlimited per processor deployment license.  In a worst case scenario you will need to pay for additional operating system and other software licenses exactly as if you were running the same machines physically but in almost all cases there is more pricing flexibility and often dramatic cost reductions for multiple virtualized hosts.

A sixth benefit is in the ability to “roll back” an entire operating system.  Most virtualization platforms allow for a concept of taking a system snapshot, making changes to the active system and then restoring the system back to its original state when done.  This is great for software testing and especially for the testing of operating system patches or any critical update process where something going wrong could cause your system to become unresponsive and potentially not repairable.  The ability to go “back in time” to the latest snapshot, taken seconds before the patch application or risky configuration change can be a lifesaver.  Of course taking an image backup could be used in the same way but snapshots allow for even more rapid recovery due to their “proximity” to the original filesystem.

All of these aforementioned benefits come with a move to virtualization and do not require additional cost for software or hardware.  If our budget allows and the need exists there is also the option of adding one of more virtualization servers and having these servers share a SAN for storage of virtual machine images.  At a minimum this will roughly triple the hardware cost but provides double the processing power and some really amazing features.  The main feature that really makes this solution impressive is the concept of live migration.  Live migration is when a virtual operating system can be moved, while running, from one physical virtualization server to another.  This can be done for purposes of load balancing, disaster testing or to survive a disaster itself.  With some live migration solutions, generally sold as high availability, this migration can happen so quickly that it provides effectively “zero downtime” and even heavily used web servers could survive the loss of a physical server without customers ever knowing that a physical server had gone down.  The transition between virtual machine host nodes is completely transparent to the end users.

There is one major caveat.  Relying upon a SAN in a disaster recovery scenario, of course, creates another point of failure – the SAN system.  So when planning to use SAN to increase the reliability of your virtual machines be sure not to use SAN that is not as redundant or moreso than your servers themselves or you may increase cost while accidentally lowering reliability and performance.

For the average small business it is not unlikely that it will make sense to not only virtualize some of the server infrastructure but virtualize all or nearly all of it.  Virtualization’s advantages are so many and its downsides so few and minor that it is a rare workload in the small business space that would justify dedicated hardware servers.

Now that we have examined why server virtualization makes sense we can begin looking towards desktop virtualization.  Unlike real desktops and servers, virtualized desktops often add a bit of complexity due to licensing requirements especially with Microsoft Windows desktops.

Virtualizing desktops is also somewhat complicated because there are many modes for physically providing desktops.  Obviously once we begin talking about virtualizing the desktop infrastructure we are actually talking about a range of solutions because some device must always exist “on the desktop” providing a keyboard, mouse and monitor which cannot be virtualized and the desktop operating system itself must be running elsewhere.  Even without virtualization this is done (and sometimes marketed as virtualization when, in fact it is simply remote access) very commonly through desktop blades, rackmount desktops or terminal servers.  All of these solutions move the desktop into the datacenter and provide access to it either from thin client front ends or simply via software to remote users existing machines such as users at home logging in to the office.

We will start with the concept of the terminal server as this is the most easily virtualized and the most straightforward.  Whether we are talking about virtualizing the server on which we run Microsoft Terminal Server (now known as Remote Desktop Services), Citrix XenApp or simply a standard Linux remote desktop terminal server we need do nothing more than install that server into a virtual environment rather than into a physical one.  It is really a question of server virtualization not of desktop virtualization – it is only perceived by the end user as being related to their desktops.

The other method of desktop virtualization, “true desktop virtualization” as I will refer to it, is to actually run desktop operating system images on a virtual server just as if they were normal desktops dedicated to a user.  This means virtualizing operating systems like Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 with each image being dedicated to a single user just as if it was a physical desktop.  We could, theoretically, do the same thing with Linux or some other flavor of Unix but as those systems do not have per user licensing or desktop specific versions and since they always run their desktops in a server mode we would only be able to differentiate between a true virtualized desktop and a Unix-based terminal server in its usage and not by any strict technological means as they are one and the same.  Only Windows truly offers a dedicated desktop model that allows this to happen in this particular manner without the concept of shared access to a single image simultaneously.

Due to licensing restrictions from Microsoft, Windows desktops must be installed one image per user even if technologies exist to make this technologically unnecessary, but still there are benefits to this model.  The big benefits to virtualized desktops definitely go to companies who have employees who roam either internally or even externally.

Using virtualized desktops provides far more control to the company than does providing laptops.  Laptops can be stolen, lost or damaged.  Laptops wear out and need to be replaced regularly.  A virtual desktop that is made accessible from the outside of the company can be secured and protected in ways that a laptop cannot be.  Upgrades are much simpler and there is no concern of the virtual desktop becoming cut off from the corporate network and being unable to be supported by the IT staff.

Almost any worker who uses a computer in the office already has one at home for personal use and often has a  laptop as well in addition to high speed Internet access.  Providing remote access to a virtual desktop at the office therefore potentially incurs no additional hardware expense for the company or staff while easing administrative burdens, lowering power consumption and increasing security.  Some workers will always require laptops but many will not.

For workers still sitting at a traditional desk inside of the company’s offices there is still a need for something physically sitting on the desk that will connect the keyboard, mouse and monitor to the newly virtualized desktop.  This could be an old PC that was planned for retirement, a dedicated hardware thin client or even a laptop.  Internal staff can then move around the office or between offices and sit at any available desk with a thin client and log in to their own dedicated virtual desktop and work exactly as if they were at their own desk.  They can then go home and work from there as well if this is allowed.

Like virtualized servers, desktops, if the need is warranted, can be easily backed up using either traditional means or by simply taking complete system images.  The flexibility is there to do whatever makes the most sense in your environment.

With the complexity and surprise cost of licensing as well as lack of ability to completely do away with hardware on the desktop except for solely remote users, desktop virtualization is hardly the no-brainer that server virtualization is.  Desktop virtualization will require careful analysis on a case by case basis to determine if it will meet the cost and usability needs of the individual organization.  Most organizations who choose to go this route will likely opt to only partially virtualize – using it only in cases where it makes the most sense such as roaming users and remote workers while keeping traditional desktops for those users who would seldom be in a position to take advantage of this technology.  Using terminal server options will often be far more common than “true desktop virtualization” which often makes sense only for power users, developers or to support certain applications that work poorly in a terminal server mode.

There is a final usage of virtualization that warrants discussion if only because it is important to understand its use in the business environment.  This final type of virtualization is not used to put operating systems into the datacenter on server hardware but instead is used to run additional operating system images on traditional desktops and laptops.  This is a common scenario for people who need to test multiple operating systems for support or development.  It is not useful for production systems and is generally outside the scope of this discussion.  It is a highly useful use of the technology but it is rather a niche scenario primarily useful for compatibility testing.

In all of this discussion there has been, somewhat conspicuously, no mention of Apple’s Mac OSX products.  There is a reason for this.  Apple does not license Mac OSX so that it may be virtualized on non-Apple hardware and Apple does not have an enterprise-ready virtualization product ready for its own platform.  The only way to virtualize Mac OSX is to purchase full, additional licenses for each operating system instance thereby eliminating most of the cost benefits of this approach and to run it on a host-based virtualization product such as VMWare Fusion or Parallels which are designed for use on top of a desktop and not as a server-class product.  This is a major gap in the Mac OSX portfolio and one of the ways in which Apple continues to lag behind the rest of the market in capability and in its understanding of its business customers’ needs.  If Apple were to change its licensing strategy around virtualization Mac OSX would prove to be an extremely popular and useful operating system to virtualize both from the server and desktop perspective.

Virtualization is a great opportunity to lower cost and raise productivity while reducing risk for businesses of any size and with budgets as low as zero.  Many technologies promise important improvements for businesses but most create questionable value while incurring real cost.  Virtualization brings real, measurable value while often costing nothing and often reducing spending immediately.  For many businesses virtualization is the technology that they have always dreamed of and is, in fact, available today.

When most people compare enterprise IT and the small business IT markets they generally think about size and scale.  Enterprise environments are huge and small business IT often consists of just one or a few IT professionals holding a company together.  The differences between these two classes of environments are much deeper than just size.  Thinking of the small and medium business market as being small-scaled enterprises is a great way to misunderstand what this market is all about.   There are fundamental behavioral differences between these organizational types and I would put forth that this behavior is likely a far better determinant between what constitutes a small or medium business and what constitutes an enterprise business from an IT perspective.

One of the places in which this difference in behavior is most visible is in vendor relationships.  In the enterprise space, as well as in large businesses, vendors act very much as a partner with the corporate IT department.  Often vendors will have dedicated representatives who spend some or possibly all of their time at the customer site and are available to answer questions, make contact with support, provide input and guidance – whatever is needed by the IT department as it relates to that vendor’s products and in some rare cases even outside of the scope of the vendor’s own products.  In exchange the vendor has nearly constant access to the “ears” of IT and management in order to inform them and to sway their opinion in favor of said vendor’s products.  This also gives the vendor direct access, in many cases, to the “on the ground” IT people who are using their products and providing them with critical, non-management feedback.

In many ways this relationship causes “the conversation” between the vendor and the “market”, as proposed by Levine, Locke, Searls and Weinberger in their groundbreaking 1999 tome “The Cluetrain Manifesto”, to take place in-person, in real-time in a way that is very traditional and effective.  When the company wants product information it simply contacts its vendor representative and that rep will provide samples, get documentation, give a presentation, organize training sessions, obtain roadmaps and more.  If the products do not meet the company’s needs the feedback is immediate and meaningful.  The relationship is symbiotic and everyone gains from the tight communication channel that is created between the enterprise IT department and their vendors.

The small business market sees none of this.  There are many reasons for this.  The scale on which the SMB IT department operates does not allow a vendor to dedicate a sales resource, let alone a technical resource, to a single client.  This one, simple difference breaks the communication channel leaving SMB IT departments in a far different position than their enterprise counterparts.  Any conversation held between an SMB IT manager and a vendor is an ad-hoc, temporary conversation.  Vendors do not get to know their clients.  They don’t have a deep understanding of their business.  They don’t see their clients as individuals but as a pool of consumers more akin to the standard, personal consumer market than to the enterprise where each customer is well known and appreciated individually.

The differences in interaction are not solely from the vendor’s perspective.  In the enterprise the IT department typically has resources with time to dedicate to interacting with vendor representatives.  Technical support roles such as server administrators may work directly with sales and engineering resources for support issues and purchasing recommendations while architectural professionals may use vendor representatives to assist in capacity planning, system design or to establish performance metrics.  In the SMB there do not exist these dedicated internal roles and the available IT resources are often overworked and spread too thinly between many different tasks leaving little or no available time to focus on single issues such as these even if the vendors were to provide such resources.  Enterprise departments often manage to even allow regular, “in the trenches” technical staff to attend sales luncheons and other vendor-sponsored events only loosely tied to their job functions.  In the SMB space this is all but unheard of.

Another key difference between the SMB and enterprise markets is in the way that they purchase for IT.  Enterprises generally view their purchasing process in terms of services.  These may include warranty services, datacenter management, software customization, hardware leases, software customization, etc.  The small business market generally sees purchasing in terms of products – either hardware or software.  Small businesses think in terms of buying desktops, monitors, servers, software licenses, etc.  Small businesses purchase the same whether buying directly from their vendor, from the channel or from the local store.  The transactions are very simple.  Enterprises think of a server in terms of its monthly support cost and total lifespan while SMBs simply see a price tag.  This does not mean that SMBs never purchases services – only that they do so typically in a very up-front, set price sort of way although they typically purchase far fewer services than do enterprise IT departments.

Enterprise IT environments have the distinct advantage of large scale peer interaction both internally and externally.  IT professionals working in large environments are constantly learning about new products, technologies and techniques from their counterparts within their own organization as well as from peers in competing organizations in their market verticals.   This gives enterprise staff an advantage in working with their vendors because they see how these vendors interact with their peers locally and elsewhere and get feedback on how other vendors in competing areas work with their clients.  This creates a competitive market for vendors based on their level of service to their clients.  In small and medium business there is very little insight into these relationships at other, similar companies.  SMBs naturally do not get interaction with a direct peer group.  At best they can hope for peer support groups for organizations of similar size, but even that is extremely rare.  Vendor relationships with the SMB market are very much isolated from peer review and market pressures.

SMB IT professionals seldom get a chance to attend industry events like their enterprise counterparts either.  They often do attend some but few by comparison.  This provides fewer opportunities for SMBs to learn about vendors with whom they do not already have a relationship.  This is very beneficial to big vendors like HP, Dell, IBM and Microsoft who need no introduction to any IT professional, but smaller vendors, new vendors and niche vendors will often find it hard to make SMBs aware of their existence let alone find an opportunity to discuss their products and services directly with them.  Making connections between SMBs and vendors capable of meeting their needs is a significant challenge in most cases.

SMBs also suffer from not having industry publications and other vertical resources available to them in most cases.  SMB IT managers may use general resources from the IT field such as technology publications and online magazines to investigate what others in their peer group are doing, but targeted materials designed specifically for their technology needs are rare if not non-existent.

Another difference in how SMB and enterprise IT departments behave is in their driving force behind purchasing.  Enterprise customers typically purchase products strategically.  This purchasing may be driven by a desire for datacenter consolidation, power reduction, features, easing administrative burdens, market pricing advantages and more.  Careful cost analysis will often cause them to buy opportunistically and a tightly coupled vendor relationship helps to enable this.  SMBs, on the contrary, are typically tactical (demand-driven.)  They purchase new products when the old are no longer serviceable, no longer meeting demand, no longer supported or additional capacity is needed.  They will seldom buy when market pressures make purchasing most advantageous but will do so quite suddenly with relatively little research leading up to the point of spending.

The SMB market is very likely to be keenly aware of the bottom line of any purchase.  This seems obvious but in the enterprise space there is normally much more room for a technical specialist to ask for features that carry extra cost because they simply feel confident that they will be beneficial.  Enterprises are often more likely to trust the hunches of their technical staff and to pay for “soft benefits” that are not easily quantifiable.  SMBs will almost always look at the bottom line and if a feature does not meet a clear requirement or provide a rather certain return on investment then they will typically opt for the lower priced option.

The final difference that I would like to address is in how prices are determined.  Enterprise customers typically negotiate a blanket discount rate that applies to everything that they purchase from their vendor.  Getting pricing on new products or price comparing many products is easy.  Very easy.  Pricing for the enterprise is quite transparent making it very simple to do cost analysis on one solution over another.

In the SMB market prices are generally negotiated on a purchase by purchase basis.  Because of this SMB IT departments generally have only a very general idea of the price differences between two different solutions – especially if those products come from two different vendors.  Gathering enough data to do a large cost analysis study is both time prohibitive and ineffectual as prices continuously change and vendors will change discounts regularly based on other factors and behaviors.  SMB IT managers cannot simply go to a single web site and look up many different discounted prices and do a quick comparison of many different products giving them a strategic disadvantage over their enterprise counterparts.

This leaves us with a significant challenge.  Now that we see why small and medium businesses are fundamentally and behaviorally different than large enterprise businesses we have the obvious question of “how are vendors and SMB customers going to overcome their natural barriers?”

To some degree there is no simple answer.  Both vendors and small business IT managers need to be aware of how vendors and their customers behave and think so that they can begin moving toward each other in a meaningful way, but this is only the first step.

Vendors need to have dedicated small and medium business representatives who specialize in the needs of this market.  These need to be professionals who have truly studied the market and understand how very small and moderately small businesses behave, what products are generally in use, what their architectures normally look like and more.  Vendors often think that SMB IT managers spend their day thinking about ERP, CRM, rapid disaster recovery planning and datacenter consolidation problems as do enterprise CIOs but, in fact, most are concerned with desktop management, virtualization, basic security and maybe even purchasing their very first server!  Vendors need empathy with the small business market in order to service it well.  Even vendors with amazing products that are perfect for this market often fail to inform their potential customers on when these products may make sense for them or may lack the ability to support them in the configurations that make the most sense.

Most importantly vendors need to find a way to join the conversation (as put forth in “The Cluetrain Manifesto”). In the enterprise space the conversation takes place inside the organization as well as in peer groups and conferences.  It is everywhere and finding it is simple.  Small businesses struggle with joining the conversation themselves – mostly because they cannot always find it, but it is there.

A perfect example of where this conversation is beginning to emerge is in online technology social media platforms like the SpiceWorks Community.  This online community has hundreds of thousands of small and medium business IT professionals and managers online and engaged in ongoing discussions on everything from low level technical problems and architecture concerns to product selection and vendor relationship management.  A few progressive vendors have joined the community and are interfacing with their customers and potential customers in a mode that, in many ways, mimics the behavior found in the enterprise.  Suddenly vendors and customers have an opportunity for personal interaction and open dialogue.

Through this conversation between vendors and customers there is a real opportunity for vendors to learn about the needs and desires of their customers, interact with customer peers, share resources and, most importantly, simply have an open discussion where concerns and needs can be exposed and addressed.  Customers have questions, often a lot of them.  There is not time during a sales call requesting pricing for the customer and the vendor to get to know one another and become acquainted with each other’s needs and offerings.  Through ongoing conversations, not only when a customer is considering an immediate purchase but on a regular basis, the relationship between vendor and customer can be formed allowing them to understand one another, feel comfortable reaching out with questions and suggestions and more.

Vendors have more than simply the chance to answer product questions when they are part of a larger conversation.  They can also provide input into conversations that are not necessarily directly related to their own products.  They can provide insight into larger architectural and design decisions.  In many cases they can take the time to explain how their products work or why they are valuable to their customers.  It is not uncommon, especially in the SMB space, for potential customers to have no previous knowledge of products that are available to them or if products would apply to them, work in their environment or integrate with their architecture.

Because the conversation is an opt-in experience vendors can talk with customers or potential customers without the need for a sales or marketing interface.  The customers are ready to hear about products.  They want know and they want to learn.  This is a marketplace where sales lead generation is already done simply by the fact that the customers are present.  They have already given the vendor their ear.

Learning how to behave in this open conversation marketplace is difficult for many vendors – especially those that are very well established large businesses. Adapting is critical as those companies that are perceived as caring about their customers will have a significant advantage over those companies who appear to find it a burden to stoop to interacting with small clients.

Large businesses are accustomed to keeping the SMB market at arm’s length often arguing that the “channel” – the reseller and system integration market – was their interface to small business.  The channel, however, acts as a chasm keeping small businesses from ever speaking directly to their vendors causing both to rely on a third party, who may not share any common interest with either, to broker any semblance of a conversation.  The channel is not incentivized to act in the interest of either party and will likely only present products and services that they themselves support and those with the greatest profit margins rather than exploring niche product options and exotic solutions that may be a better fit.  The interest of the customers are then not passed back to the vendors leaving the vendors guessing blindly what products and services would be useful to the SMB marketplace.  The lack of experience with SMBs often means that vendors are completely unknowledgeable about their customers or in many cases simply do not even have those customers.

A perfect example of this breakdown in communications is with IBM.  I watched an active online conversation involving IBM where a large group of heavily experience SMB IT professionals were discussing IBM and its place in the SMB space – what products it offered, how they would compete with other vendors and IBM’s specific relationship with small businesses.  In this conversation I heard repeatedly people speak about IBM’s only SMB focused offerings being its desktops and laptops.  I was shocked, as I suppose was IBM itself, since IBM stopped manufacturing these products many years ago having sold that division to Lenovo.  Even experienced IT professionals taking an interest in IBM, enough to participate in what evolved into a virtual panel discussion on their role in the market, were kept so far removed from IBM itself that they were unaware of even who IBM was and what they offered in the market.  A significant eye opener for everyone.  Likely this breakdown in market communications has been caused by IBM’s reliance on the channel to provide them an interface to their customers and that channel finding it better to sell Lenovo products as IBM products to customers who know the name IBM but do not know Lenovo than to take the time to educate their customers.

IBM is certainly not alone here but with their relatively recent divestment of their desktop and laptop business to Lenovo has created a unique and dramatic challenge in their interface to the SMB market.  IBM’s key competitors, Hewlett-Packard and Dell, use their desktop, laptop, display, networking and printer products as their key “in” with SMB customers and then, once chosen as a vendor, are able to make the relatively rare server sales to this market as well.  IBM has the challenge of selling servers and services to a market that is guaranteed to be buying its desktops and other products from a competing vendor.

Sun (now a part of Oracle) has long faced this same challenge in this market.  SMB IT managers understand desktops and laptops well – this is their bread and butter, what they deal with primarily every day.  Most SMB concerns are desktop related and the bulk of their purchasing is done there.  SMBs do not buy servers in large quantities with rare exception and using a different vendor for infrequent server purchases, which would involve separate vendor relationships and managing different support contracts, is not something that SMB IT managers are going to seek out.  Companies like IBM and Sun need to be involved directly with these customers and make them aware of their unique product offerings, such as Power and Sparc platforms in this example, to even have customers understand who they are and what they may offer.

This issue, hardly unique to IBM and Sun, is exacerbated by the use of the channel.  SMB IT shops will generally only turn to one system integrator, managed service provider or vendor to supply them with hardware.  Since PCs drive SMB IT this means that SMB shops will, by necessity, be turning to managed service providers who are partnered with someone who supplies desktops.  That then makes it rather unlikely that those service providers would additionally be partnered with someone like IBM or Sun.  This then, in turn, causes that service provider to automatically recommend products only from the vendor(s) with whom they are partnered further isolating customers from potential solutions from alternative vendors.  This isolation can be mitigated through direct vendor to customer relationships even if purchasing itself is still handled through a channel provider.  It is in both the vendor and the customer’s interests to interface directly and to engage in a conversation.

It is not uncommon to see IT managers choose a vendor based primarily upon that vendor’s willingness to engage in an open conversation.  Customers like vendors with whom they have a relationship.  They really like knowing that when something goes wrong or when a great new, but not entirely understood, opportunity arises that they can turn to a vendor representative, especially in an open community like SpiceWorks, and ask them for assistance or guidance.  No one expects the representative themselves to have all, or even any, of the answers.  They expect that person to have the resources necessary to reach out internally at the vendor and engage the right people.  Not only is this method friendly and cost effective but it is also very low stress.  Customers often don’t know where the problem may reside and do not have contacts internal to the vendor, unlike enterprise customers who often deal with specific issues so often that they know the necessary resources at the vendor, and without a representative to whom they could turn they may be left without the necessary contact information or channels to get the assistance that they need.  In some cases this may result in customers feeling that the product is poorly supported or just does not work and in others could result in new opportunities being lost or the customer turning to another vendor whom they know offers a workable solution.

While the online SpiceWorks community is hardly the only venue for vendor to customer interactions it is rapidly becoming a unique place, do to its scale, reach and unique SMB focus, where vendors and customers can make connections, join in open discussions, create relationships and get support.  The community is extremely large, over 700,000 IT professionals all from the SMB ranks and is rapidly expanding both with its online presence but also with local users groups and regional SMB IT conferences – all of which present opportunities for vendors to interact with the SMB marketplace in new and exciting ways.  SpiceWorks represents, I feel, a key component in the future of vendor relationships in the SMB IT market.  SpiceWorks acts as a broker to the conversation providing the venue and framework necessary to make customer/vendor interactions as simple and valuable as possible.  As the community continues to grow and as more vendors decide to become a part of the conversation I expect to see the value of this forum expand exponentially.  It is in communities like this that those vendors serious about the SMB IT market will succeed in differentiating themselves and engaging current and potential customers.

Blade Servers are the hottest trend in datacenters today.  I am sure that you have heard the hype: lower cost and better efficiency.  To be sure, blades have come a long way in the last few years and are looking better than ever, but considering putting blades into your own business is something that should be considered very carefully.  There are many hidden dangers inherent to the blade concept that are often overlooked and these hidden dangers can come back to haunt you long after you have committed to the idea of blades.

Before we look into blades themselves I want to discuss what blades are.  According to Wikipedia: “Blade servers are stripped down computer servers with a modular design optimized to minimize the use of physical space. Whereas a standard rackmount server can function with (at least) a power cord and network cable, blade servers have many components removed to save space, minimize power consumption and other considerations, while still having all the functional components to be considered a computer.”  It is important to define blade servers because it has become common, especially in the used server market, for resellers to use the term blade to refer to standard, 1U and 2U rackmount servers in the hopes of confusing customers new to the blade market.  Blades are a specific hardware category that requires the use of an enclosure and are not simply “small” servers.  Blade servers use shared components in the enclosure, such as power supplies and remote management consoles, reducing the components necessary in each individual blade server.

The first danger of blades is cost.  Blade enclosures are generally very expensive even though blades themselves are often less expensive than their rackmount counterparts.  In a quick price comparison of a large blade vendor’s offerings the enclosure was approximately $5,000 and could hold a maximum of eight blade servers.  Each blade was roughly $500 less expensive than the matching vendor’s rackmount server of the same or similar specs.  This means that a fully populated blade enclosure, at list price, from this vendor would cost $1,000 more than the equivalent computational power in traditional form factors.  And every blade slot not populated would be an additional $500 deficit.

The cost of blades is not just a total cost factor.  Blade enclosures, often holding eight to sixteen blade servers, need to be purchased up front.  If you need enough servers to match the capacity of an enclosure this is not a factor, but if you are looking to buy only a single server now you may be making a significant investment in proposed future server farm growth.  This means increased risk as well as an investment against the time-value of your dollar.

Hardware cost is always a difficult number to nail down.  Stated prices from the vendors rarely reflect reality and, as most companies know, dramatically lower prices are available if you demand them.  I have known companies to get their blade enclosures for free, for example, which completely changes the cost equation of blades.  But in the same breath one must remember that if a blade enclosure is available for free that serious discounts on traditional rackmount servers are likely also available.  So the list prices are often a good judge of relative prices even if not absolute ones.  Your mileage will vary – so due diligence is necessary to create a cost analysis appropriate for your given situation and the deal that you receive from your vendor.

The second danger of blades is technological obsolescence.  Unlike traditional racks which have gone practically unchanged for many decades, blade enclosures are new and relatively dynamic.  Several generations of blade enclosures have come and gone since their inception in 2001 and each subsequent generation, thus far, has required shops to replace their enclosures to support new blade servers.  This is a high risk if you are not buying servers often enough and in large enough quantity to justify the technology churn in the enclosures.  This rate of change is slowing as the technologies mature, but risks remains.  When doing a proper cost analysis of blade servers this rate of change needs to be factored.

The third danger is vendor lock-in.  Traditional rack technologies are vendor agnostic.  Most shops will mix and match not only servers but batteries, routers, switches, monitoring equipment and other gear into their racks.  Blades are vendor specific.  For a large enterprise this is of little or no concern.  In a small shop with a limited number of servers it can be crucial not to give up the ability to use different vendors and technologies.  This can be a limitation on technology but also is a limitation on leverage to obtain premium vendor pricing discounts in the future.

Take, as an example, a shop that wishes to run HP Integrity blades with their Intel Itanium processors today.  They invest in blade enclosures and begin using them.  In three years they purchase software that runs on Sun UltraSparc or IBM Power processors.  In order to use blades each of these technologies will require their own brand of blade enclosure and will significantly increase the risk in a small shop that enclosures will not be able to be fully populated.  There is much more flexibility in technologies using traditional rackmount servers because each vendor generally supplies one set of RISC or EPIC-based systems and one set of AMD / Intel-based commodity systems.  If you want more than that blades will become quite difficult for a small shop to manage.  I have worked first hand with shops that use multiple technologies like this on a regular basis making blades a most difficult choice today before considering potential future platform desicions.  The use of Apple Mac OSX must also be mentioned as Apple does not provide blade servers so any deployment of OSX-based servers cannot be integrated into a blade enclosure.

The fourth danger is the shared backplane and other key components.  A blade enclosure, while generally built with massive redundancy and with truly amazing design, still represents a single point of failure that must be considered.  If your enclosure fails you do not lose just a single server but as many as sixteen physical server platforms.  With rackmounts servers you can add redundancy simply by adding an additional server – typically one matching server for each server you need.  With blades you have to have redundant enclosures for the same level of reliability.  Again, for a large enterprise this is trivial and obvious.  For a small business the need to suddenly own dual enclosures for full redundancy will often result in simply foregoing that level of protection and increasing risk.

The fifth danger is in the cost of flexibility.  Small IT shops may not often move their equipment around.  The option is generally there, though.  If a small business owns three servers and replaces one with a shiny, new unit the option is almost always there to redeploy the old server to another role elsewhere in the company – perhaps in a branch office.  With blades the old blades can only be redeployed in a location that has a blade enclosure matching the one from which the blade was pulled.  This is a cost of lost opportunity late in the server lifecycle and often completely ignored in cost analysis of blades.  If there is not a spot ready for an older server it is far more likely to be discarded in the blade model rather than redeployed unless the company is large enough to have many enclosures available all of the same generation and with available space ready to accept an older server.

The sixth danger of blades is the high cost of storage.  Storage is a subject all its own these days with SAN, NAS and DAS as possible options.  Shops of all sizes are moving to SAN and NAS quickly and with enough network storage in place this can alleviate much of the storage risk associated with blade servers.  Many shops, however, use circular reasoning and justify SAN because of the blades and blades because of the SAN.  Taking a holistic view of the server and storage picture is crucial.

A typical blade server can house only one or two 2.5″ SAS or SATA drives.  This is far less than a typical rackmount server would provide as potential storage space.  It is common to find eight to sixteen drive bays available in popular 2U rackmount configurations – sometimes using 3.5″ drives rather than 2.5″ drives.  One popular and very cost effective 2U server can hold 28TB of low-cost storage on fourteen spindles.  You cannot put this type of storage into a blade enclosure.  Because local drive space is simply not available, blade server owners are forced to use minimal direct attached storage and use SAN or NAS instead even when DAS would provide better performance and cost (otherwise) for that particular application.

To bridge this need most blade vendors provide storage blades – blade servers that act as tiny, low volume SAN devices and fit directly into the blade enclosure.  These units are generally of rather low capacity, often just six drives, and rather expensive compared to other means of providing storage.  Additionally they use a critical enclosure bay removing one of the potential slots necessary for a blade enclosure to provide server density.  So an eight bay blade enclosure with two small storage blades would only be able to house six blade servers.

Obviously buying a blade enclosure does not mean that you have given up the ability to also use rackmount servers when appropriate.  You can continue to mix and match.  But to obtain the numbers necessary for a small business to cost justify the blade infrastructure often requires that purchases lean heavily towards blade servers to fill the enclosure(s) as densely as possible.

Much of the danger of blades is in the potential for lost opportunities.  Small businesses especially function best and compete most strongly against larger businesses by being flexible and agile.  Blades are the opposite of agile.  They require large, upfront infrastructure planning that includes technological, physical and geographic lock-in.  Even if a business plans ahead and sees no obstacles to adoption this does not mean that opportunities will not be missed in the future, caused by a lack of flexibility to adapt to changing business conditions effectively.  Once a blade enclosure is in place purchasing decisions almost certainly are made based on the investment already made and no longer on simply what is best for the company.  This doesn’t have to happen but almost certainly will.  The existing investment needs to be protected.  This is the natural reaction to have.

All of this being said, blade servers can still make a lot of sense for certain businesses.  Blade servers generally consume less power than their non-blade counterparts due to their shared system components.  Be sure to consider the power consumption differences in the storage area, however, as blades push power consumption from the server to the SAN and can often be misleading as to where the power is going.  A savings in one place is only valuable if the cost does not appear again in another.

Blades are easy to transport and relocate when enclosures are available.  This can be a bigger factor than is obvious especially when it means that there are several additional staff members capable of relocating a server.  Almost anyone can lift and move a blade server.

When combined with a very aggressive SAN infrastructure, blades can be very beneficial to a virtualization environment.  This combination gives the maximum cost and flexibility advantage to businesses large enough to leverage it.  The SMB market mostly consists of businesses for whom this would be very prohibitive, though, and this solution will continue to be relegated to businesses at the larger end of the SMB spectrum.  Virtualization will, in fact, reduce the number of servers needed by most businesses making it even harder to justify blades to smaller businesses where previously a dozen or more servers would have been needed but today only two to four are needed to not only meet but to surpass earlier service levels.

If you can support adequate densities or get really aggressive vendor incentives then blades can be quite cost effective if you calculate against your risks.  Blades are always a little more risky, but if your cost is reduced significantly in buying them then they may be very much worth the risk in flexibility.  The cost of the enclosure is a key factor here.  If your enclosure is free then suddenly the cost savings of a blade system can be enormous – especially if a large number of blades are purchased providing really good enclosure density.

Blade servers are a great technology and show a lot of promise for the future.  As enclosure lifecycles slow, new technologies emerge, costs are reduced, volumes increase and, hopefully, as vendor-neutral standards emerge I am confident that blades will become the de facto standard in even the smallest datacenters.  I see this as taking at least another market cycle before this will really occur.  Most likely, in my opinion, it will be another five to seven years before the form factor truly displaces the rackmount server in general utility.

If your business is anything like the businesses with which I normally deal one of the hardest items to tackle is documentation.  This can include all kinds of documentation from human resources processes to accounting practices to core business procedures to the information technology department’s system records.  Businesses need good documentation for many reasons.

Traditionally small businesses simply end up doing without key documentation and have to reinvent the wheel every time something comes up for which the people currently working have not had a chance to memorize the process.  Larger businesses often place their limited documentation into Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF files and store them away in an unsearchable file server or possibly even on paper – putting them into large, ringed binders that no one even knows exist let alone how to find necessary information within.  These are not effective processes, but there is a simple solution.

The solution is a web-based application known as a Wiki.  Most people get their first introduction to a Wiki through the ubiquitous online encyclopedia Wikipedia which is built on a Wiki platform (MediaWiki, to be specific), but this is hardly the only use for a Wiki.  Wikis are simple document repositories designed to allow many editors to easily create and modify online documentation.  The whole concept of the Wiki is about being simple and easy.  The full name, Wiki Wiki, means “quick” or “fast” in Hawaiian.

Wikis have now been around for several years and have begun to become popular in many businesses.  Wikis are generally very lightweight and there are many vendors making both open source and proprietary Wiki products in addition to several hosted services available online.  You can really pick out a Wiki based on your particular needs.  Most Wiki products are free and for the budget conscious business there is no reason to need to consider a Wiki to be a cost center.  This is a simple product that your IT department should be able to roll out for you quickly and easily giving you a documentation repository right away.

At first the idea of a Wiki is a bit foreign to most people.  On the Internet we often encounter Wikis in use for system documentation.  This is becoming increasingly popular. Wikis are often used to allow anyone to log in and make documentation changes.  This can be a good way to get started with your Wiki.  You can also start from the beginning with detailed user access controls allowing only certain individuals to post documentation in the system instead of allowing a documentation free-for-all.  Your needs will depend upon your type of organization.

What makes the Wiki concept powerful is the ease with which anyone can hop on, search for documents that they need and create or modify those documents if they cannot find the information for which they are looking.  The entire concept of the Wiki really encourages staff to make use of the format.  Lowering the barrier to creating useful documentation is the best possible way to get documentation created, and because the documentation is so easy to modify it makes it far more likely that that document will be kept up to date.

A common feature amongst Wiki systems is the idea of tracking changes to Wiki pages.  This means that if someone goes in and makes a change to a page that people using the Wiki system can view past versions of that document to see what changes have been made over time and by whom those changes were made.  This feature also makes it very simple for a system administrator to roll back bad changes if someone is not posting appropriately.

One of my personal favourite Wiki features is the idea of subscribing to a particular Wiki page either through email or an RSS feed.  The subscription model allows any staff members to be alerted to changes to documentation in which they take an interest.  These can be staff members for whom a particular Wiki page is critical to their job functions such as HR managers following changes to the corporate employment policies pages or just interested staff members who want to know when a page changes such as managers subscribing to the cafeteria’s lunch menu page or developers subscribing to a page about a particular software project’s status.

This method is a wonderful way to allow anyone to keep up with any publicly available knowledge without needing to interupt the actual process to view status.  Useful at every level of the organization and extremely simple.  So often organizations do a poor job of keeping everyone “in the loop” who needs to be and with the Wiki subscription model everyone has the opportunity to take responsibility for keeping themselves informed through whatever method is most useful to them.

As I mentioned before, there are many Wiki products available on the market today.  There are enough that choosing one is actually a rather formiddable task.  Some key differentiators between products include their use license, the data store architecture – typically filesystem based or database based, their platform dependence and their integration with other products and authentication systems.  Of course there is also the option of choosing a hosted Wiki service that hosts your Wiki online – mostly this is popular with companies using Wikis as a means of serving their customers rather than for private, internal documentation.  There are so many Wikis from which to choose that the site WikiMatrix is dedicated to helping you choose the Wiki that is best for you.

Before you dive into the world of exploring Wikis on your own I will mention a few that are rather popular and worth looking into early on in your Wiki decision making process.  Popular Wiki platforms include MediaWiki, DokuWiki, TWiki and pmWiki.  These are just the tip of the Wiki iceberg but provide a good look into the features that you should expect to see throughout your search for the best Wiki for your implementation.  The Wiki choosing wizard on the WikiMatrix web site is a great place to begin as well.  Each of these Wikis that I have mentioned thus far are available for free and rather than spending a lot of time studying their benefits you may wish to simply download one or more of them, install them on a spare server and give them a try.

In addition to stand-alone Wiki products like we have mentioned here there are also Wiki engines built into several enterprise content managment and portal systems such as Microsoft’s Sharepoint, Alfresco and Joomla.  For any businesses looking to make a larger investment in an enterprise content management system having a Wiki functionality built into that product can provide a single, unified Intranet web portal interface to serve many different internal documentation and document storage needs.

Wikis are powerful and affordable tools that small and medium businesses can leverage today, even in a climate of budget cuts and uncertainty, to document processes, ease documentation burdens and increase internal communications and efficiency.  It is unlikely that we will see the popularity of the Wiki concept wane but rather they are already beginning to take their place as a staple of the business documentation and communication process.

If you mention microblogging to anyone today the first thing that you are going to get is an ear-full about the importance of social media and platforms for enabling the conversation and about customer interaction.  Okay, fine.  Over-hyped and poorly understood buzz that we can probably safely ignore for now.  Social media matters, yes, but spend some time on Twitter and, while a lot of people are talking, you will quickly learn that very few people are listening.  The platform is going somewhere, but right now most of the people talking in the microblogging space are talking about microblogging.  This will pass.  For now we have other concerns that are more immediate.

While I tend to quickly dismiss microblogging as the “next big thing in social media” as mostly hype from the marketing folks trying to convince people to look at them for another ten minutes I do think that the concept of a highly limited, easy to use, microblogging architecture to be one of great potential import to business.

When I talk about microblogging for business I am not talking about the popular notion of sending your intern out to post about your product on Twitter in order to garner market attention.  What I am talking about is using an internal microblogging infrastructure to deliver status about the people in your organization to your organization.  In the same way that companies have internal blogs delivering information to their own staff the microblogging platform can be an internal tool for our organization and not just something that we use to tell our friends across town what we are having for lunch.

Other social communications tools like traditional blogging, instant messaging, email, etc. started as over-hyped social media, even if the term did not exist yet, and ended up becoming standard, well understood business communication tools that are important pieces of the corporate communications toolkit today.  Microblogging will be the same.  And, like all of those communications tools that came before it, this tool is one that your company can start using today to get the benefits years before your competitors catch on.

Microblogging offers a potential boon to inter-team communications in companies of just about any size.  By providing an easily accessible microblogging platform for the use of your team you provide a simple way for individuals and teams to provide small, manageable amounts of status information to the rest of the company in a highly consumable format that is easily understood.  In the smallest organizations, those with less than five people who all sit in a single office, this may not matter, but start adding any additional number of people or start putting those people in disparate locations and suddenly microblogging matters.

Instead of hypothesizing about microblogging out of context let’s dive right into some sample scenarios and see how microblogging for internal use can help your company.  Remember that like many social media technologies, the leading microblogging platform, Laconi.ca, is completely free and something that your IT staff can roll out for you today.

Scenario 1: The Saleman

John is a salesman.  He works for your company but is almost never in the office.  He spends his days on the road, often in other cities.  You are lucky if you have face time with John twice per month.  Several people would benefit from knowing John’s status, but John is incredibly busy and does not have time to manage any extra email traffic.  He carries a BlackBerry but only answers emails from his current and prospective clients during the day and is exhausted at night when he gets back to his hotel room.  He communicates the bare essentials to you, his boss, but allows you to provide the necessary information out to anyone in the company who might need to know what customers need or new accounts might be coming online.  This makes you both a bottleneck and a point of failure.  What if you don’t communicate the necessary information to the right people quickly enough?

The solution?  Microblogging.  If your firm had an internal microblogging platform you could have extended it to John’s BlackBerry (iPhone, Windows Mobile device, regular cell phone, whatever) so that instead of sending you a quick email John could have posted all relevant information to his own microblogging feed.  Then any interested party in your organization could look at that feed to get up to the minute data straight from the horse’s mouth rather than having it unintentionally filtered and delayed.  People who need immediate updates could be subscribed to John’s feed while people who just want casual sales updates from time to time would just visit his web page when they felt it necessary.  Everyone gets the right data at the right time and you have more time to worry about the business itself.

Scenario 2: Software Development Teams

Software development is famous for its extensive need for communication.  Developers are famous for being unable to communicate easily between individuals and between teams.  Software development often requires a great deal of granual status updates at both a team and at an individual developer or manager level.  Microblogging is hardly a panacea for this situation, but it may be a very powerful tool in the communications toolbelt for this situation.

By giving each individual developer their own internal microblogging account they can make quick and easy status updates whenever their current task changes.  Other developers, who need to know on which components work is currently being done, can just subscribe to the feeds of the appropriate developers to know what everyone is doing at the moment.  Managers can know on what each of their team members is working without needing to stop by their desks and interrupting them unnecessarily to do so.

In this model, communications happens more quickly, more thoroughly and with less disruption to staff who are extremely sensitive to disruption and task switching.  Training the developers to make regular status updates – probably just a few per day taking less than five total minutes – will take some time but once it is part of the usual workflow it will make everyone’s life much easier.  It is also a great opportunity for people to solicite and offer help on certain problems.  A developer might post “working on the foo widget and trying to figure out the bar interace” and someone subscribing to their feed might see that and, being the bar interface expert, can shoot an email or run over to their office to help them out before they waste an afternoon reinventing the wheel or looking helplessly for missing documentation.

Scenario 3: General Office Updates

Most offices are bigger than a single space in which everyone can sit down and have lunch together.  Even a relatively small business with two offices or even two home offices could likely benefit from the advantages of simple updates.  It is important for businesses to communicate.  Internal business communications is one of the ways in which companies are able to outperform individuals – by sharing knowledge and tasks between many people.  If each of those tasks is so discrete that you need no communications then you just might be better off working as individuals doing the same tasks.

By the use of microblogging even general office staff can post simple updates a few times per day so that all of the offices have a good idea of what is happening in the other locations.  Whether it is seeing when lunch or meetings are underway, when the office has left for the day, seeing what new projects or challenges have arisen or finding out what customer interactions have taken place that day that information can be used to keep the separate offices working in a unified manner rather than as two completely separate locations with a very poor understanding of what the other one is doing.

Scenario 4: Department Information

If your company is large enough to have separate departments then microblogging may be just the tool that you need to enable departmental status updates to the organization.  This is not an appropriate solution for human resources to publish their latest employee handbook updates but it could be the perfect spot for them to announce the company picnic or open enrollment for benefits.

Many departments’ core function is to supply a needed to service to the rest of the organization.  Human resources, information technology, finance, billing, purchasing, etc. all exist to service the internal business needs of the organization.  If each department had its own microblog feed then it would be easy for each of them to provide simple updates to the entire company.  People might subscribe to individual department feeds, look at the department website when they have an interest or possibly all department feeds would be aggregated onto an employee portal web page or other unified information location to make these updates obvious to everyone.

The information technology department might post a reminder about phishing attacks or social engineering dangers or could post a status update to the email system that is currently down allowing everyone to keep working without spending their time phoning the already overworked IT department and delaying them from fixing a problem on which they are already working full speed.  Purchasing might post a link to a page on new purchasing procedures that may otherwise have gone unnoticed.  Finance may send information regarding a change in the way that employees must file expenses.  Potential examples are numerous.  How often does your organization wish to make a policy or procedure change but find that informing the company of the change can be very difficult once employees have learned the old procedure.  Updating the employee handbook or financial web site do little good if people have memorized the process and no longer reference those materials.

Scenario 5: Mentoring and Employee Growth

One of the less obvious ways in which microblogging can benefit your organization is in the area of employee development.  Senior employees, while posting regular updates to their microblog feeds, provide an opportunity for more junior members of staff, especially new employees and interns, to follow their feeds in order to gain a deeper understanding into the tasks that they complete on a day to day basis.

By giving junior employees the chance to observe their “mentors” in an unobtrusive manner they may benefit from learning how they work, how their time is spent and how they prioritize their days in addition, perhaps, to learning about their interests, what relevant books or articles they have been reading, what websites are important to them and more.  This is hardly a replacement for traditional mentoring but allowing employees to seek out information about other employees that they admire or from whom they wish to learn can be very valuable.

I don’t know the specific communication needs of your business, but I would be surprised to find that it would not benefit from an increase in internal visibility.  Microblogging can facilitate communications between teams, between peers,  between managers and their staff and even between disconnected pieces of the organization.  Microblogging offers a simple, low-overhead, loosely-coupled process that allows every level of an organization to provide status and information to all interested parties within that organization.

Microblogging does, of course, offer additional benefits outside of internal status communications that we have discussed here.  Servers and other IT equipment can post alerts automatically via the microblogging architecture giving anyone interested a chance to see real time failures and alerts on the network that may affect them.  And then there is external microblogging offering status and information out to customers, vendors and interested parties outside of your organization.  But those topics are too broad for this article.

Special thanks to Andrew T. West for his help with this article.

The first rule for any purchasing situation is, of course, plan.  Desktop and laptop purchasing is no different.  A good plan is the first step to good spending when it comes to your small business’ personal computer needs.  This plan should, quite obviously, be made in conjunction with your IT department or manager who will have valuable input not only to features that may be needed but also important information as to the IT staff’s readiness to support specific models and features.

The first piece of advice that I generally give to small businesses looking to purchase new computers is to not become religious about which vendor to choose.  There are many good vendors.  I, like all IT professionals, tend to be pretty biased towards one vendor over all others and have a few vendors which I specifically dislike.  I won’t mention any of them by name here.  But most anyone to whom you will speak looking for purchasing advice will be almost religiously zealous about one brand over another.  In reality, all of the serious players make very good equipment and you can get your needs met very well by any one of them.  Your key players in the desktop and laptop space include Lenovo, Dell, Acer, Toshiba, Hewlett-Packard and Fujitsu.  Apple, of course, is also an important vendor but is rarely, if ever, purchased in competition with other vendors.  Apple hardware is purchased to run Mac OSX.  There is rarely a buying decision made involving Apple that is not made simply through operating system support necessity so there is no point in including them here.

All of these vendors make great products so don’t worry if your pet vendor does not get picked in the end.  There are other, more important, considerations that demand your attention.  Picking the vendor to supply your needs will most likely be determined by factors that are often overlooked.  Here are a few factors which you should consider when picking your vendor:

• Which vendor can provide a “holistic” supply of all of your desktop, laptop, netbook and server needs?  Working with a single vendor is often preferable to working with serveral when it can be avoided.  This leaves Dell and Hewlett-Packard as your true “stand outs” simply because of their broad and impressive portfolios.
• Which vendor’s products are most able to be supported by your IT department or your IT service vendor?  If your IT provider has great expertise with certain makes and models then these may present an advantage not to be overlooked because your IT staff will already be prepared for hidden “gotchas”, common failures, repair tactics, documentation, driver issues, etc.
• Which models support operating systems that you are using today and any that you expect that you may use during the lifespan of the product?
• Which models have features which, on their own, are important to your business such as type of processor, power consumption, network options or management features such as Intel ATM?
• Which products provide the warranty that makes you most comfortable?  I generally recommend getting units that come with a standard three-year warranty as this covers, by default, most of the life of the hardware.

The second piece of advice that I give to small businesses at the beginning of their purchasing process is to be sure to only deal with commercial products.  That means to avoid consumer-grade products at any cost.  There are many reasons why commercial-grade equipment is important to your business and I will just touch on some of the highlights.  I should point out that I also give this advice to individuals looking to purchase computers for home use for the exact same reasons.  In general, computer manufactures make consumer grade equipment for a less discerning audience and you never want to run your business on anything designed around a lower degree of discernment when you have the option.

• Companies stake their reputations on their commercial products, not their consumer ones.  The bulk of sales go to businesses and this is where the real money is.  Large companies do not turn down large orders because of home-user complaints and so only issues with commercial products impact corporate buying decisions.
• Commercial products are often purchased in large quantities to single purchasing managers with a great deal of control over the success of that particular model.  Vendors have a lot at stake with each order and work hard to make sure that the equipment is reliable and consistent.  Consumer gear is sold on an individual basis and so vendors have no reason to pursue consistency and rather than making systems reliable it is easier for them to replace them quickly when their fail.  So consumer parts are cheaper and have less testing.
• Commercial products are produced in fewer, more useful, configurations in larger quantity.  This means that each model gets a high degree of scrutiny and testing both by the vendor and by highly skilled IT departments.  Consumer goods get a lesser degree of internal diligence and are purchased mostly by average home users who do not provide a great degree of detailed technical feedback to the vendor and to the community.
• Corporate buyers demand that their systems be field repairable and modifiable using standard parts.  This causes commercial systems to be, almost always, extremely easy to repair and upgrade.  Consumer gear is often highly proprietary and made using non-standard parts making repair and upgrade processes less reliable.  This has decreased in recent years but is still prevalent.
• Software vendors, like Microsoft or Red Hat, have a much larger interest in making sure that corporate machines are well tested and supported from a driver perspective.  Supporting hardware that may only exist in a relatively few consumer machines is of lesser importance.
• Commercial hardware is almost always manufactured directly by the vendor directly or under contract to that vendor with heavy supervision.  Consumer systems are often manufactured by third parties, sometimes with no vendor interaction, and then simply labeled with the vendor’s brand name and sold as if the vendor had manufactured it themselves.  Often this results in system documentation and drivers available only from websites hosted in Taiwan with little or no support in English (which is important to my readers who only get SMB IT Journal in English.)
• Warranty support for commercial systems is generally far superior to warranty support for consumer systems.  Vendors will often overnight parts and allow field repairs at the end-user’s request.  Consumer systems often have to be shipped back to the vendor and will be shipped back weeks later having been wiped clean while out for repairs.
• Phone support for consumer gear usually involves off-shore call centers using staff that does not work for the vendor in question.  Commercial phone support, while still often off-shored, is usually handled by internal vendor staff with direct access to internal resources when necessary.
• Most vendors have local partner firms who are available to help your business work with, modify and acquire their commercial gear.  Consumer gear is often available only via the web or from large consumer electronics chains.  One channel is designed for business users and one is clearly not.  Access to local partners can be a big advantage when you need warranty repairs but dare not ship your equipment away or when you need any number of custom services.
• Commercial hardware generally ships with OEM (original equipment manufacturer) licensed copies of Microsoft Windows in “business” configurations (i.e. Windows Vista Business or Windows XP Pro) which are appropriate for businesses to use while consumer hardware almost always comes with “home” editions of the same operating systems which are not appropriate for business use.  I have known many businesses to mistakenly purchase consumer gear and then have to pay full price for an appropriate Windows license after having thought that they were saving money.
• Commercial hardware is seldom more expensive than consumer gear by more than fifteen percent and often is comparable in price and sometimes less expensive.  Price is a rather nominal factor when other features are compared side by side.
• Commercial hardware is generally built on far superior chipsets and with more reliable technologies while consumer gear often comes with “flashy” features designed to entice users looking to use this hardware for entertainment puroses.  In speed tests, commercial gear from major vendors tends to outperform consumer gear from the same vendors when all other specifications are the same.  There are many facets to computer system building that are not mentioned “on the box” and this is one place where consumer-grade equipment can skimp because the purchasing process does not take these things into consideration.
• Commercial products generally have excellent online documentation while consumer gear often lacks in this area quite dramatically.
• Commercial hardware is often warranties for much longer periods of time than is consumer gear and generally lasts for many times longer than its warranty period without incident.  It is not uncommon for commercial desktops to be in use after more than ten years.
• Commercial hardware is often less noisy than consumer gear.  Good commercial computers are often nearly silent.
• Commercial products look professional and uniform when outsiders, or even employees, come into your offices.  Consumer gear gives the impression that people have been bringing in computers from home to use at work and can give a bad impression to your clients and even to your own employees.

When purchasing your new computers keep in mind the importance of uniformity.  Your IT staff, especially if it is just one or two people, but even if you have a large staff, will appreciate the opportunity to get to know the hardware which they support.  This can do much to reduce support issues and downtime.  It is very comforting to know that when a desktop technician arrives at your desk to fix your computer that they know every screw, port, cable and part of that computer inside and out and that they can take it apart and put it back together without thinking twice.

This hardware familiarity means that upgrades are handles much better as well.  If each machine is unique in your environment and you decide to upgrade all machines to double their memory (RAM) then you may be in for one surprise after another as your desktop technicians open up the machines to discover that they have differing types of memory, different configurations and different limits from each other.  Each machine will be a new surprise on its own.  If all of the machines were the same then the technicians would already know that the current configuration was two sticks of one gigabyte each and that there were two open slots which could accomodate a total of four more gigabytes but that the existing sticks had to be moved to the empty slots before putting in the new memory in the currently used slots.  Simple upgrades that are almost a no-brainer in a uniform environment can become a maintenance nightmare when equipment varies dramatically.

Another important consideration for desktop and laptop purchasing is that of the operating system.  Small businesses, unlike large enterprises who get their operating systems through bulk volume licenses with Microsoft, generally get their software licenses through the OEM copies that are included with their purchases.  Small businesses may opt to work with a volume licensing program as well but this generally adds extra cost which only makes sense in the large scale of big enterprises.  Because of this small businesses need to be very aware of the included software license of the desktop and buy accordingly.  The cost of changing the operating system on a newly purchased computer should the wrong operating system be purchased with the system can easily be fifty-percent again the cost of the original computer.  A rather significant mistake to make.

In addition to considering the operating system that ships with the computer we should also consider if we will be changing operating systems during the life of the computer.  If this is the case then we need to be sure that the computer is able to accomodate the changes in the future.  Often this is a guessing game and cannot be determined up front but this is not always so.  Currently it is very common to purchase computers to run Windows XP with the intent of eventually, or at least potentially, moving to Windows Vista.  Many commercial machines today ship with both operating systems as options.  It is very easy for a business today to purchase a machine that is certified to run either operating system so that the business can upgrade when they are ready without needing to purchase new hardware in order to support the new operating system.  Even better is cases where the computer comes dual-licensed and the older operating system can be used until such time as the migration process is ready and then the newer operating system can be installed without any additional licensing costs.

Of course with any computer purchasing plan we also need to consider basic features.  For most businesses there are very few important features for a desktop model.  Almost any desktop unit will suffice from a raw feature perspective.  Occassionally special features like Intel AMT are required but this is rather uncommon and less common in smaller offices.  Laptops often have a few additional features of interest such as wireless connection technologies, availability of docking stations and port extenders, size, weight, etc.

Careful planning for these features can have a big impact on an office environment.  For example, purchasing ten laptops with expensive 802.11n wireless technology might be a great way to improve wireless productivity but it could all be worthless if you accidentally buy one cheap laptop that only has 802.11b causing your wireless system to degrade itself to support the lowest common denominator in your environment.  Or buying all of your gear with GigE connections just to discover there is no budget for a GigE switch or cabling.

Another important factor to consider when planning your buying decisions that applies exclusively to desktops is form factor.  Most major vendors provide commercial products in one of three basic sizes.  The largest size is the “mini-tower” which is the form factor with which most of us are most familiar today.  This form factor looks best when standing “upright” and is, as it sounds, a small tower.  It is able to accept full-sized expansion cards which may be an important consideration depending on what your users will be doing with their desktop computers.  Often mini towers can accomodate two or more hard drives.

The medium form factor is generally known as “small form factor”, SFF or “desktop form factor”.  This is the more traditional desktop style computers that we see mostly in office environments and less often at home.  This form factor is roughly the same size as the mini tower but is “thinner” making it work best when laying on the desk.  This makes it very stable and often it works very well as a stand on which to place your monitor.  This size also fits well under desks especially when mounted to the under side of the desk.  Many SFF models are also designed to be easy to stack so that they can be stacked on a desk when need be.  I often use then this way myself as I use several desktops at a time and have them stacked behind my monitor array.  Small form factor desktops generally can only accept “half height” expansion cards which limits their options significantly although it is not very common for businesses to need to expand their desktops in this way.  Small form factor desktops can often accomodate up to two hard drives although only being able to fit a single drive is quite common as well.  Many vendors provide stands that allow SFF desktops to stand on their sides.  Special stands are needed because they generally vent from their sides and cannot be sat directly on them.

The least common and smallest is the Ultra Small desktop.  Most commercial vendors only make a few special high volume models in this smallest form factor due to its increased cost and lack of popularity.  Often to keep the size small on these units they have only a single expansion slot, lack many standard ports and can only handle slower than standard processors because of heat dissipation issues.  It is not uncommon for them to have less memory growth options than their larger siblings.  These machines are very commonly mounted under desks as they are so small.  They are very easy to manage for companies that regularly need to move their computers around.  IT staff can easily carry them from desk to desk and transporting several by car is no problem.

Display output is another important consideration when choosing desktops and laptops.  It is becoming increasingly common for office workers to have multiple monitors and not all computers are prepared to handle this.  Many commercial machines support dual monitors out of the box but many require special expansion cards to handle this.  Planning to buy computers that provide this capability natively or planning to add on expansions should be considered from the onset of the purchasing project.  Laptops often have the ability to add a monitor built in either to the laptop itself or, at least, to a docking station.  This can make laptop users far more productive when they are sitting at their desks.  Many businesses opt to simply add high-end graphics cards to their desktop units that support multiple monitors in addition to providing increased GPU power to their users.  This can be a good option but can easily add as much as twenty-five percent to the cost of the hardware so should be considered carefully.  Common configurations appropriate for business machines will often be around ten percent of the initial hardware cost.

As you can see, there are many factors that should be considered when making a desktop or laptop purchase and in this discussion we have not even begun to discuss those factors that everyone discusses under normal circumstances such as cost, availability, performance, etc.  The point here is that cafeful planning should be employed and should not be a purely emotional or financial decision but should involve the staff who will be supporting and managing these devices as they will have a great deal of important insight into this process in your environment.  Be sure to have your IT strategist, whether this is an IT manager or your desktop support technician, play the key role in this process.

While some small businesses today have managed to ween themselves from the world of paper, the vast majority of small and medium businesses are still tied, to some degree, to their printers and faxes no matter how hard we all try to move away from them.  Everyone recognizes the cost of acquiring printers, maintaining them, networking them, stocking ink and toner, etc. and yet we just cannot quite manage to do away with them completely.  Given that printers remain a business necessity we should treat them as such and devise a well-planned printing strategy for our business whether it is for an office with two users and a single printer or several offices with dozens of printers or more.  Every business will benefit from planning before purchasing their printers.

One of the biggest mistakes that I have seen happen time and time again is with small businesses deciding that they need a printer and runing out to buy one at the local shop without any planning whatsoever including failing to determine if the printer being purchased will even meet the immediate need let alone fit into an ongoing printing strategy.  Printers are so common, lack significantly visible new features between generations, are low enough in cost and are so readily available in the consumer market that it is misleading to businesses making them think that buying any printer off of the shelf will meet their printing needs, but this simply is not the case.

Our first concern in printer purchasing is in appropriately sizing our printers.  Before buying a printer we need to decide what type of printing load it will need to handle over its lifetime.  Many small businesses today, as paper begins to phase out, will find that even a very small printer will provide more than enough capacity for an entire office.  If users can share a single printer then printing costs can be saved through centralized printing.  It is far cheaper to maintain a single printer and to stay stocked with supplies for one printer than for one printer on everyone’s individual desks.

If reliability is of concern you could place two printers in the office to be shared and have half of the staff print to one printer and the other half to the other but permission everyone to both printers so that, if one should fail, everyone would remain able to print.  You could take the opportunity to place the printers in different areas of the office to reduce time walking to the printer to pick up printed pages.

Most small offices have no problem sharing a single printer for most printing needs with a single, separate printer on the desk of whoever is doing personnel management to allow for “private” printing for times when the data coming out of the printer cannot be seen by just anyone in the office.  Although this type of printing is one of the areas where the company can go paperless the most easily and so this may not be a factor in your office.

Now that we are considering shared printers we must concern ourselves with making sure that the printer(s) that we are selecting has a duty cycle capable of handling the printing needs of the entire office.  In many cases any printer will be up to this task but for offices who print customer invoices throughout the day, for example, may want to step up to a slightly more heavy-duty model designed for the extra wear and tear.  Larger duty-cycle printers often use lower cost ink or toner supplies that reduce the per-page printing cost that is highest with smaller, lower-cost printers.  For an office with very heavy printing needs the cost savings of big printers can be significant just in the cost savings from the supplies before even considering other factors.  Larger printers will generally also hold more paper reducing time spent restocking the printer and will often have other cost saving features such as dual-sided printing and automatic collation.

Many business also need additional functions in addition to pure printing such as faxing, scanning and copying.  These functions are natural extensions of the printer and are available in office all-in-one multi-function printer models.  Often, though, low end all-in-one models are marketed heavily towards small businesses in the hopes that these businesses will buy on a whim without researching duty cycles and supply costs as these models often include a cheap-to-acquire, expensive-to-maintain printing element bundled with the unit.  In general, printer manufactures make their big money on printer supplies and almost nothing on the printers themselves so we must be acutely aware of the specifications of the printer portion of the all-in-one unit before making a purchase.  Often a single all-in-one multi-function printer will suffice for even a relatively large office and any additional printing needs could be met with high-volume printers that do not have additional functions included in them saving additional costs through careful planning.

We must also consider how our new printer or multifunction device will connect to our network.  Most low cost printers use USB connections to allow them to connect to a single workstation or server for printing.  This is fine for most home users and very small offices but larger offices (and many advanced home users) find this unsuitable as it means that all printing must go through someone’s workstation and that the computer must be in close proximity to the printer.  The computer must also be on at any time that the printer is being used and maintenance on the computer will impact the printer as well.  I know many small offices that only use this model and for them it works fine, but it does cause additional management overhead that is not necessary.

Networked printers have long been the norm in the office environment and they provide many advantages over direct-attached print devices.  Networked printers can be located anywhere on the network whether or not there is a computer close-at-hand.  Networked printers can be monitored and managed on the network just like any other network device making their management costs lower from an IT perspective.  Network printers can print even if no other computer is turned on.  Some network printers have wireless networking built in giving them additional flexibility.  Non-network enabled printers can be made into virtual network printers through the use of a print server such as HP’s DirectJet or the NetGear PS121.  Print servers are often built in to multi-function network appliances such as small business firewalls like the Apple AirPort Extreme.  These types of devices will allow you to attach any USB printer to the network if you did not buy this functionality built in to your printing device.

Often overlooked by small businesses is the differences between laser and other printer technologies such as ink jet.  Generally, laser printers cost more to purchase but have lower lifetime operational costs both from a hardware perspective as well as from a printing supply perspective.  Laser printers are more likely to be able to be fixed when parts wear out and their toner costs are almost always significantly lower than the cost of ink for ink jets and need to be changed out far less frequently making printers less of a manual burden as well.

The output of a laser printer is almost always more pleasing as well and looks more professional.  It is difficult to hide the use of an ink jet printer and even if the reader does not directly notice the quality of the printing subconsciously they will often register that the printing process was less than professional.  This may not matter for most of your office printing, but considering that laser printing is generally cheaper in the long run there is little reason to not also get the best looking prints possible.

Ink jet, bubble jet and other non-laser technologies generally come into serious consideration only when photo printing is required which is very rare in a business environment.  High quality colour printing requires additional printer management and very expensive paper and ink supplies.  For most businesses, if this type of printing is needed, it would be needed in addition to, not in place of, traditional monochromatic laser printing.  Colour laser is another consideration for presentation graphics but is generally not suitable for photographic printing.  Colour laser adds additional cost that is seldom warranted for the type of printing that most businesses need to do.

So, in conclusion, when making a printer buying decision for small business we must carefully consider our printer strategy.  We must size our environment, take into consideration our network design, scale our printer(s) appropriately, consider the cost not only of the printer but also of the printer supplies and consider the manner in which the final prints will be used.  A simple spreadsheet can be used to do some very useful and telling calculations about print volume, printer cost and the cost of supplies.  All of the information necessary to do these calculations should be available from printer vendor web sites.  Consider your printer to be an investment and research accordingly and, as always, use your IT department, whether internal or outsourced, as a resource in any IT purchasing decision – it is their job to understand the technical differences in these products and to provide you with the necessary information to discern between different models, vendors and technologies.

There really is not any question about whether or not NetBooks will be an important tool for businesses of all sizes – they will be.  The upsides to NetBooks are too big to overlook: highly portable, generally more rugged that laptop counterparts due to size, light weight, easier to store and transport and mostly quite inexpensive compared to traditional laptops.  There are exceptions to any rule but the prototypical NetBook is dramatically smaller than a traditional laptop, weighs only one to two pounds (under a kilogram) and often costs no more than seventy percent as much as a laptop (any price comparison is massively subjective for obvious reasons.)

The question is not whether or not NetBooks are a good idea, but whether or not the NetBook market is ready for the enterprise (or, in our case, the SMB.)  While the idea of NetBooks has been around for quite some time that realization of the market has only begun to take effect within the past two years.  The NetBook was originally developed by Psion in 2000 but they exited the market in 2003.  The next big player was the United Nations with the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) which was an extremely low cost, ruggedized, Linux-based NetBook available for just $199USD.  With the development of the OLPC and the ecosystem of suppliers and developers that it fostered the low-cost, portable Internet device market was set to explode.

The big news for normal consumers came in 2007 when Asus, a major Taiwanese manufacturer famous for their high-quality motherboards, released their EEE PC line of NetBooks and, later, NetTops.  The EEE PC proved to be a major hit with consumers because of its low price tag, attractice looks and size.  Once the market was identified many manufactures jumped in with top-tier manufacturers like Acer, Lenovo, Dell and HP finally in the market now as well albeit generally from their consumer divisions and not from their commercial divisions.

Today we are in a rapidly maturing consumer NetBook market.  This means that NetBooks are well established, widely available and stable but, thus far, only in configurations designed for consumer use.  This presents our first barrier when considering these devices for the workplace.

With only rare exception, NetBooks ship with either consumer versions of Microsoft Windows (i.e. XP Home, Vista Home) or with non-enterprise versions of Linux (i.e. Linpus, Mandriva.)  To be sure, there are a few machines that ship with appropriately enterprise class operating systems like Vista Business or SUSE Linux but mostly the operating system that you find on the NetBooks are not the same as you would require in your business.  (Many niche NetBook manufactures do ship with Ubuntu or Fedora which are acceptable to many businesses but these are rare as well.)

In some cases, such as the very popular Acer Aspire One, it is quite easy for an IT department to establish their own operating system image and to apply it to the NetBook.  This is hardly a cost effective approach for a small shop to take, however.  This is only an effective approach under very specific circumstances or for very large orgazations who will be rolling out a large number of identically imaged machines and can spread the cost out over the group.

In the case of the Acer Aspire One we have a very well built unit that runs either Linpus Linux (a derivative of Fedora or Windows XP Home.  Windows Home editions are not able to be integrated into business environments so we can rule out that option completely.  The cost of obtaining an additional XP Pro license would be very prohibitive on hardware that is so inexpensive.

The Linpus model is significantly less expensive than the Windows XP Home model and can be outfitted with a custom build of Fedora 10 replacing the including system at no additional external expense.  This does require a rather knowledgable Linux engineer to do and takes many hours to perfect and test.  Most likely a few days of labor at a minimum.  Only large shops with good internal Linux expertise or smaller shops with IT outsourcing partners with the necessary expertise should attempt to go down this path as it leaves you completely without any form of vendor support.  It also requires your IT department to monitor and support an additional operating system image unless you have already standardized on Fedora – which is not very common.  There are other options, such as installing OpenSUSE or an Ubuntu variant but these require additional work as Fedora is used to create the Linpus base and installs so easily onto the device.

Using Linux-based NetBooks often presents another problem.  On a normal corporate desktop running Linux it is most common to find either KDE or Gnome running as the desktop.  These are the two most popular, full featured desktop environments for the UNIX platforms and, to most users, it is the choice of KDE or Gnome that establishes the familiarity with the environment and not the underlying operating system.  Because of this, users who have used KDE on SUSE Linux can often be switched to KDE on PC-BSD without the user even realizing that the operating system has changed (Linux to FreeBSD.)  But NetBooks are often underpowered when it comes to running these heavy desktops and so alternatives are generally recommended.  Most commonly today we see XFCE chosen as a lightweight desktop environment alternative but even lighter options exist such as IceWM.  These environments can make NetBooks very usable instead of being slow and cumbersome but they do cause users to face potentially unfamiliar interfaces that can lead to additional support needs and possibly even training.

Having NetBooks available for a certain class of highly mobile or continuously on-call personnel can make a lot of sense.  The advantages are very real and, while some users are put off by the small screens and keyboards and dislike the lack of high-performance hardware, many users adore the portability and easy of use of these small devices.  If having a NetBook makes the difference between staff being able to work or having to disconnect from the office then the NetBooks will easily pay for themselves.

For most businesses I feel that we are still in a phase of early-adoption when it comes to NetBooks.  The hardware itself is well tested and widely available but the software is mostly not ready at this time.  In the next two years I expect that we will see a lot of advances in the market, especially as AMD and NVidia are expected to begin entering the market in force during this time allow with other potential players who currently have had very little input to the market such as Freescale.

Currently, and for the near future, businesses looking to NetBooks need to almost across the board make a commitment to using Linux rather than Windows.  The Windows operating system is just not ready to handle the NetBook market and will likely wait until NetBooks catch up to modern laptops in performance before really looking to enter the enterprise NetBook market.  During the mean time, however, alternative architectures, such as PowerPC, ARM and MIPS, are being experimented with within the market and their adoption poses a technological barrier to running Windows on these devices.  Microsoft may find that the NetBook could be a critical loss of market for them as Linux vendors like Novell, Red Hat and Canonical will see it as an inroad into the enterprise desktop space.  It is not coincidence that Red Hat has just announced its official return to competiting in this market.

At this particular time I feel that it is good to begin investigating NetBooks and seeing how they may or may not fit into your business IT strategy.  Most small businesses will find, like their large enterprise cousins, that the NetBook is inexpensive to obtain but expensive to support in a corporate environment.  This will be changing rapidly as the NetBook format becomes more common and business begin to clamour more and more to get these provided, in business-ready configurations, from the top vendors.

As a small business it can often be a challenge to obtain deep insight into the workings of your information technology organization.  When it comes to web sites there have always been a number of decent, free tools that would do the job adequately, such as Webalizer.  But these tools require some level of additional setup and expertise which means either more time being spent on your own attempting to learn and manage another IT skill or paying your IT staff to do so.  Today we have another option.

Google offers a great, free product available online called Google Analytics.  Analytics is a complete website tracking package that sends all of its data to the Google Analytics website where you can view your statistics online or have a report emailed to yourself automatically at set intervals.  Google handles all of the code, storage and reporting involved in keeping tabs on your company’s websites making your job very easy and allowing you to focus on your business rather than your technology needs.

The system works very simply.  After signing up with Google as an Analytics user you go through a very simple process of adding a web site to be monitored to your account and then Google generates a small snippet of JavaScript code which you then need to copy and paste into the code of your website.  This works for multi-page sites and with most content management systems such as WordPress – although for a CMS you will need to check your CMS documentation to know exactly where to place the code.

Obviously it will take a little while for Analytics to begin collecting the data that it needs in order to generate reports for you.  After a day or so you should begin to see the reports in action, although it takes a month or more before the data that is collected will really begin being valuable to you.  Some of the most important data obtained from a web site is changes in your readership over time to alert you to when you are doing things right or doing them wrong for your market.

Google Analytics collects and collates a lot of useful information for you.  You can see breakdowns of which pages are drawing readers and which are turning them away.  You can see what search terms readers are using to find your site.  Analytics also provides a very nice map report that allows you to see your readership from around the world.

Using Google Analytics you can find out more about the users that your site is attracting and you can learn how they are using your site.  By obtaining this data you can learn how you can better reach you intended customer base or learn more about your existing customers.  It can also teach you what information on your site users are able to find and what process they are using to reach that information.  A tool like Google Analytics or Webalizer is a critical first step in making your web sites work for you.

Visit Google Analytics’s Features Page to learn more about the features available from this product.

When disaster strikes it is a good time to reflect on what preventative measures might have saved the day.  Working in IT, as I do, mitigating and even preventing disaster is a big part of the job.  No matter how hard we try disaster can still strike and being prepared for it is very important.

Email is one of those systems that almost no business can function without in this day and age.  Getting to lost email messages quickly is almost as important as getting email flowing again.

Recently, I had to deal with a pretty significant email disaster.  A lot of email was lost.  Getting email back up and running wasn’t too hard but a lot of email had been lost.  In a post-mortem we looked into many potential solutions to the ongoing issue of email backups which are often tricky and difficult to do properly.

One of the best suggestions made in our post-mortem engineering sessions was to have email backed-up, on the fly, message by message via forwarding to Google’s GMail service.

Now, before we get too far, I need to state that this is not a comprehensive backup solution.  Using email forwarding to GMail (or any other email service) must be handled account by account which causes it to scale very poorly.  It would be an administrative nightmare for a shop of any size but is quite easy for a very small organization of up to possibly twenty or thirty people.  It also does not handle outgoing (sent) email in any way but only incoming email – which is almost always where the important messages are located.  A traditional backup of your email system is still necessary.  This is really a complimentary service not a replacement solution.

What is great about forwarding to GMail is that it is free, it is extremely convenient, it can be handled by the email users who want it and ignored by those who do not,  it is almost instantaneous and the backups will continue even when an email client is not connected – unlike an IMAP or POP client based backup strategy.  Google provides so much storage capacity that likely you can send years of email messages to GMail without ever needing to clean out your archived messages.

Email forwarding can be set up by individual users or by an email administrator although if individual users do not manage their own GMail accounts this can be problematic.  There is also the potential option to have several company email account forward to a single GMail account although comingling email will result is all kinds of potential headaches later and be sure to be very confident about your legal ground for combining email in this manner.

Smaller organizations need to carefully consider how to take best advantage of the email options that they have available to them.  Email forwarding is one way in which very small organizations can take advantage of their size.  Large organizations would be forced to use more complex and expensive backup strategies to achieve these same results.