SMB IT | Curtis Franklin » February 2008

February 26, 2008 | Comments: (0)

A Green Network

TAGS: SMB Networking

If you're not convinced that the choices made by businesses can make a difference in financial and environmental results, you should be checking out Ted Samson's Sustainable IT blog on a regular basis. This week, he's taken a look at D-Link's new green networking products. It's easy to make light of the impact a managed switch can have, but as with so much in the small business world, the changes add up.

For me, the best part of many "green" networking products is that they've eliminated the fan. It's a result of the peculiar work I do (and my small office space), but loud equipment can drive me batty. Quiet equipment is wonderful -- the silence makes it that much easier to hear customers calling in those big orders.

Posted by Curt Franklin on February 26, 2008 09:28 PM

February 25, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Microsoft's SMB Strategy

TAGS: SMB Vendor Strategy

Microsoft has firmed up some of the details of its upcoming SMB operating system release. The IDG's Elizabeth Montalbano reported on the details in a story at InfoWorld last weeek. To some extent, there are no surprises in here -- it's all about bundling more services in a package that's easier to deploy. The interesting facet it the web services side: Microsoft's Small Business Strategy leans heavily toward helping SMBs move both internal and external communications to a service-oriented architecture -- the sort of thing that makes perfect sense for the small business, but is typically the realm of the larger enterprise.

Looking at the Microsoft news reminded me of a conversation I had at the InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum. One of the speakers told me that the issues faced by small businesses and large enterprises in virtualization are exactly the same; the only difference is the resources that can be deployed to deal with the issues. To a great extent that's true with small businesses and enterprises in dealing with pretty much all IT issues. The real questions don't revolve around the problems to be solved (they're much the same across the board) but in how many resources the smaller business can deploy to deal with the problems.

When I've covered security, I've long defined the SMB as a business in which security it handled by a networking generalist who has security as a part of the job portfolio. Enterprises have dedicated security staff. Most vendors agree with the logic of this definition, and it works for many other areas of computing. Vendors are now realizing that there is a huge market made of of companies that have a single IT person (whether in-house or under contract) to take care of all their IT needs. Building solutions that can reasonably be deployed by this overworked generalist is in the best interest of the vendor and the customer -- and it's a step I'm seeing more and more vendors take. Microsoft is no exception, and it will be interesting to finally put my hands on the product in the near future. I'll have more for you then...

Posted by Curt Franklin on February 25, 2008 10:21 AM

February 04, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Virtualization: The Management Take

TAGS: SMB Tech News Today

I'm now in one of the breakout sessions at InfoWorld's Virtualization Executive Forum (I had an abbreviated form of the event name in my earlier post), where five executives are talking about deployment of blade servers and other virtualization hardware and software. There have been a couple of interesting take-aways so far:

First, the answer "it depends" is everywhere when you talk about virtualization. It's great to hear this when so many people get very religious about their choice of hardware or (especially) software for putting together and virtualized environment. Things are changing so rapidly that looking honestly at your requirements, then being open about which solutions you'll consider, will almost certainly give you a better solution than decided first that you'll use a particular platform then trying to mold your analysis to fit.

Next, the management issues are huge. I'm not talking about virtual machine hypervisors, but human managers who can't change their thinking to meet the new realities of a virtualized infrastructure. When you're considering virtualized deployment, you should absolutely build time to evangelize management into your planning process -- it will pay huge dividends as you roll out the production systems.

More from the Forum after lunch...

Posted by Curt Franklin on February 4, 2008 12:05 PM

February 04, 2008 | Comments: (0)

Virtualization: The SMB Take

TAGS: Today in SMB Tech

I'm at InfoWorld's Virtualization Forum in San Francisco today, and much of what we're hearing is aimed squarely at the largest IT organizations. I'm beginning to see more vendors and analysts talked about virtualization for SMB organizations, and they're making good points.

This morning, I heard a keynote address that had a line talking about the dangers of success -- the significant hit to an IT infrastructure that a huge number of web hits can produce. It leads to a good question: are you ready for success? I can't tell you how many times I've had discussions with companies in which they talked about the success they wanted, but when I asked them about what would happen if everyone answered their ad or responded to their marketing program, they had no idea.

I'm not saying that you need to over-build everything on the assumption that you'll be the next Google by sometime next month, but you should make sure that your IT infrastructure is up to the task of supporting your customers and partners even if they all decide to respond to your marketing. It's tough to think about success as an instigating incident for your disaster-recovery plan, but you should have those plans in place -- with any luck at all, you'll actually get to use that particular plan.

What would happen to your IT infrastructure if your business really started to take off? Are you ready? Let me know what you have to think about this one -- leave a comment or drop me an e-mail message.

Posted by Curt Franklin on February 4, 2008 10:46 AM

February 01, 2008 | Comments: (0)

SMB Business Continuity: Only One ISP?

TAGS: SMB Security

Early this week I wrote about the importance of backing up your business data. The "Backup" meme continues through the week with news of another sort -- network failures on a grand scale. First we hear that the Middle East is off the Internet, apparently because someone dropped an anchor on a critical undersea cable, and then comes word that AT&T's EDGE network fell off the edge in the Southeast and Midwest for large parts of Thursday's business day.

Most of us don't need to manage and maintain undersea cables, and it's not like you can easily move your Blackberry from network to network, but failures like these point out that too many of us have single points of failure where they're unnecessary. Think about your ISP: do you have a backup in case they have significant trouble? The router in many offices has a provision for fail-over, and sometimes that function has even been correctly programmed, but does it go to another node of the same ISP's network? If so, you're not getting the protection you want. If your ISP suffers a failure in their core routers, you could be left with no access if your fail-over hits those same routers.

Many ISPs offer low-cost plans at low bandwidths, and low bandwidth may be enough to keep your business limping along until your primary ISP makes repairs. Don't be afraid to look to cable companies or the phone company's DSL provisions as reasonably-priced backups for a higher-dollar commercial data line. Once you have the backup provisioned, remember that you need to test the fail-over at least twice a year so you know that it works -- and what it's limitation are.

"Business Continuity" as a discipline tends to focus on large enterprises, but the fact is that most small businesses have a much thinner margin of error than the big corporations. Spending a little time and a little money can help make sure that your business is still around on the far side of the next problem that hits your corner of the Internet.

Posted by Curt Franklin on February 1, 2008 07:05 AM