Author Archives: tsawyer

There are more than hackers and trusting (or untrustworthy) employees — there are acts of nature that threaten your business’s continuity.  You never know when fire, flood, tornado, riots/uprisings, robbery, or other catastrophic events will occur but if one (or more) of them does strike, how long will it take you to get your business back online? Without a disaster plan in place, it will take too long.

Your plan should cover hardware and software replacement, data recovery, and key configuration, restoration, or installation details.  It should include appropriate software license numbers, insurance numbers, and key contractor or supplier numbers. It should cover testing, validation, and performance criteria. Furthermore, you need to thoroughly test your recovery plan before you need it.

If you have any questions about disaster recovery planning please send an email to tsawyer@acumengroup.us.

Server speed has more than doubled in the last 2 years. Application power requirements have not significantly increased.  Because of this most servers are being underutilized.  To take advantage of all this wasted computing power multiple servers can be loaded on a single piece of hardware.  Server operating systems (Windows and Linux) become “clients” loaded am a host server.  These clients are called “Virtual Machines”.  The “Virtual Machines” run exactly the same as if they were loaded directly on a dedicated piece of hardware.

There are other advantages of using “Virtual Machines”.  They are hardware independent, which means they can be moved from one brand of server to another without any re-configuration.  In a disaster the backed up machine files can be quickly loaded to new hardware.  In larger enterprises “Virtual Machines” can be moved from one host to another without turning them off.  In the event of hardware failure machines can automatically move to another host and restart in seconds.   This provides high availability and allows maintenance to be done with no down time.

If you have any questions about how Server Virtualization can be applied to your business please send an email to tsawyer@acumengroup.us.

You have probably been hearing a lot about “The Cloud”.  Everyone in the technology world is talking about it. The problem is that everyone seems to have a different definition.   The cloud is simply a group of servers, whether on your local site (Private Cloud), at one of your remote sites or a trusted 3rd party remote site.  You can store data, backups or run applications in the cloud.

There are many questions to consider when looking at cloud services.

• What products and services are best to move to the cloud?
• Who has your data? How fast can it be retrieved?
• How does the speed of the internet connection effect productivity?
• Can your company still operate if your internet connection is down?
• How does an outage at your provider effect your company’s operation?

This new offering will back up all your PCs and Windows servers to a local cloud, and then replicate this backup to an off-site cloud.  If a mirrored Windows machine fails, a virtual image of the machine can be created on the private cloud within a few minutes.  As your PC’s age and become unreliable, they can be replaced by “Thin Clients” while the same OS runs on the local cloud. Since all the PC’s files are being replicated in the cloud, data can be restored very quickly if there is a simple hardware failure or site disaster.

If you have any questions about how cloud technology can be applied to your business please send an email to tsawyer@acumengroup.us.