Few IT Solutions for SMB/SME market

Despite the number of people in a company from business perspective, SMB and Enterprise have similar requirements & request from the Information Technology. They all expect the service continuity, anywhere access and low cost! During this time period every company dream is to get maximum out of the IT investment and still reduce the cost without loosing the functionality. Business continuity is a key factor for survival of any business. Service disruption for few minutes to few days impact can be devastating depend on the business nature. So how can SMB market segment overcome these limitations with fraction of the cost where Enterprise companies invest on?

To make things simple in this article I’ll focus on Microsoft products and the features offered by them. But as usual hints will be provided for the similar feature products as well :)

1. Which Operating Systems to invest on by SMB customers – My 2 cents advise goes for SBS 2008 or EBS 2008. There are significant advantages on these operating systems once properly configured and used. Less attention is been given due to the nature of the product names. Small business Server itself is not a product to be taken lightly, the solution is far more complex than the out of the box. If you’re company fallen under SME segment then consider the scale out product like Essential Business Server which can be spanned into 3 physical servers or virtual servers. Again these are Enterprise class ready product which has been limited only be the CALS and not by reducing any FEATURES. (Period)

2. Cost cutting on Hardware and software purchases – Consider HYPER-V for server virtualization. It will be ideal if you can consider few of your legacy applications to run in their own OS environment to make them less conflict with the latest operating system. Believe me Virtualization will be the ideal solution for this.

What ever your next purchase make sure it is 64bit and Virtualization capable. Always make sure you have enough hardware expansion room. (Eg: Buy 2 processor socket system with one physical processor, buy RAM with enough RAM slots.) Make sure your existing hardware can be utilized as Storage systems. There are easy ways to convert your existing servers into cost effective SAN storage and make maximum out of it. Microsoft offering of SAN software will be coming on OEM so you can consider a product like StarWind iSCSI storage. (more information about how-to articles in future)

3. Backup and Protect you data – This is part of your service continuity and availability plan. If you’re going to have HYPER-V as your virtualization option consider how to backup the virtualized environments as well. From Microsoft point of view DPM 2007 (Data Protection Manager) will be the ideal solution to protect your physical and virtual environments. DPM 2010 can be expected around Q2 in year 2010 with lots of new improvements along with desktop backup and offline laptop backup as well.
when it comes to DR solution and high availability options SMB market has been backed away by the pricy hardware devices and software. Thanks for various replication technologies and offline backup options this is becoming reality to SMB market as well. Microsoft is working closely with ISV partners to make sure software solutions exist for data replication with DR sites. As I mention StarWind is a very popular company coming up with these solutions. Best of all these solutions are costing a fraction of price of DAS or Hardware SAN with HBA adapters.

4. Consider managed services or hosted solutions when you don’t have the necessary skills in house. hosting your E-mail accounts under your company domain name is no longer a dream. You can have your own Exchange server e-mail accounts, access your mails from mobile (OWA, OMA) with a fraction of the cost of having in-house. The key question is to indentify the margin of in-house vs hosting solutions. For few SMB markets in-house might not be the ideal and much more preferred way of controlling how things happen. But that comes with additional price tag of hardware and maintenance model.

So as you can see SMB / SME market having so many options when it comes to cost reduction and still balance their business requirements. It’s all about taking the right moves knowing their business requirements and limitations. Let me know if anyone interested on these solutions and would be glad to provide more information.

Technorati Tags: SBS 2008,HYPER-V

Reality of server virtualization and cost reduction

Is your company ever facing the challenge of effectively managing the servers and infrastructure growth? Is server virtualization been shown to you as the only resolution to overcome the problem along with the Green IT concept? Sadly in Sri Lanka Green IT concept is not widely being adopted even though reducing $$$ really makes sense for us :)

So most of us has been hearing about server virtualization offered by various vendors. (Microsoft, VMware, Citrix….etc) but in order for a company to move to a virtualization road what are the facts need to be considered. Virtualization concept has been expanded from server virtualization to desktop virtualization, application virtualization so a decision maker need to take careful consideration which option is the best for their company to adopt. Let’s look at some of the key facts,

1. Reducing cost – At a glance this seems to be the biggest favor factor. Server consolidation of 3:1,  2:1 and even 10:1 or more. But the missing picture is this true to my company? Can I really archive that kind of consolidation ratio? This is a question need to be ask from your IT department. How can I know which servers are the best candidates to consolidate? Depend on the answers we’re getting out of that, companies need to decide virtualization strategy.

2. Power / Cooling saving – These are some of the direct benefit of the virtualization. Reduce the server for print in your data center will lead for you to spend less money on the power and data center cooling.  

3. Standardization / Compliance – These are some of the indirect benefits companies can achieve. System administrators will be able to better manage server operating systems and applications in the virtualizations systems by using system management products. Bringing the entire data centers into standardized environment will bring better Service Management and also will help companies to compliance with industry regulations.

Looking at a glance we have so many advantages moving to server consolidation and better utilization of existing hardware through server virtualization. So what is the catch the hidden untold story of the server virtualization?

1. Possible candidates -Indentify the server which can be virtualized. Not all the servers in your company can be virtualized immediately. First rule is to identify the servers which can be virtualized. MAPS (Microsoft Assessment and Planning Service Toolkit) is a good tool for this job. MAPS is a tool beyond server virtualization identification. Check for your self on the MS web site :)

2. Availability- When you have separate physical servers to run your company application loosing one server is not a major problem for you. Once you do the server consolidation of 3:1 what if the only physical server holding that 3 server roles goes down? How that will impact the company overall functionality? Not a happy picture right? Server availability is a critical factor to be overseen when it comes to server virtualization. Plan well ahead how you going to protect those servers from failures. This is a part not being added to the $$$ but need to be given careful attention. Additional hardware or backup hardware or software attention must be given,
    Server virtualization not always going to utilize your existing servers. As I have seen in our market most of the companies are still having 5-6 old servers in production. You’ll need to invest on new hardware. Better of all have a god planning on how to recover from one physical server which host several servers.

3. Server sprawling -  Creating virtual servers unnecessary or with less control to mange the overall environment will lead to this. Fortunately this is not a question or as situation our market will lead now :)
Once you have move into the virtualization road you have to have better control of what server how and where you create them. Server virtualization will loosen the bond of operating system with physical servers. If you’re not careful enough you’ll end up creating unnecessary number of virtual servers and resource wastages instead of resource saving. Fortunately VMware center, SCVMM is there for the help but end of the day ultimate control is with humans who are vulnerable for making mistakes :)

4. Cost – Virtualization will itself is not going to bring immediate ROI if you didn’t plan well but another over burden to our IT budget. Additional storage cost, network equipment, servers….etc you name it cost will go if you didn’t identify the above mention goals properly. Know what you need to virtualized and how to protect them as well.

So where we end up on server virtualization? How can SMB, SME or Enterprise enjoy this technology? Number one rule is take time for careful planning. Use the given free tools to better understand your environment and plan the resources well ahead. Virtualization is not only limited to server side so you can be carried out by many factors. Know the company business objective and how to drive them with virtualization. None of the above mention facts are to keep you away from virtualization. My honest opinion is virtualization (may it be server, application…..etc) is really good but little bit of extra planning will make your life easier.

Happy virtualization!