Connecticut's IT Managed Services Blog

Are your backups taking too long? How often do you test them, and are you sure they would restore properly when you need them? The problem with most disaster recovery solutions is there is no middle ground for SMB’s (Small Medium Businesses). Large corporations can invest in complex virtualization strategies using technology from VMware, this is a great option, but companies with limited IT support or who don’t have the funds to invest in virtualizing their servers are stuck with strategies that don’t give them the support they need. Many are forced to continue using Tape as a backup solution, which has a notorious reputation of not being able to restore. Others rely on having a RAID array, giving them the benefit of allowing a hard drive to crash without losing data, which does give them some security, but only in that one respect. If the server were to die the data would be fine but wouldn’t be assessable until the server was back up and running. This leaves SMB’s with old outdated and extremely limited Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plans that don’t even come close to the benefits that virtualization gives the larger corporations.

NSI’s main target audience has always SMB’s and having seen the gap in technology brought its technicians together to create the ZoomBox. The ZoomBox is an NSI ran and owned product that gives SMB’s the virtualization protection that their business needs without having to change their entire network. What happens is NSI installs a client on any Windows machine that the customer wants to ensure up time and data protection. The ZoomBox then creates virtual images of each server/desktop 1-3 times a day, this image is then backed up to the cloud for extra protection, ensuring that all your data is perfectly safe regardless of what might happen to your business environment.

Password security is one of those things that you don't think about until its too late, here we outline a simple list of Do's and Don'ts when picking a secure password. Hint: if you password is a simple dictionary word with a couple numbers its not secure.

Most people have hear d the term RAM used before among computer users although many don’t know what exactly it is or does, they know that having more is probably useful to them. RAM literally stands for Random Access Memory and is used to fix the problem of reading data from Spinning Drives. Your computer writes/reads data from the hard drive but because traditional hard drives are spinning mechanical devices, it has the problem of being slow, so slow that the rest of the computer has to wait for the hard drive to finish before moving on to its next task. This creates a “bottleneck,” which is simply the slowest part of the computer, which forces the rest of the computer to slow down to that pace. Because hard drives could only go so fast they formed a way to get around this, RAM. What the RAM does is store files temporality on the chip, these files are ones that the OS needs to access constantly or needs quick access to at any given moment. By having this split between the Hard drive and RAM you create a place to store files permanently and another to store ones you need to access quickly, these files tend to be programs that are currently open, which is why it takes so long to load the program the first time, but only a few seconds to gain access to it after its loaded.

The benefits of virtualizing your desktop environment are numerous, in today’s world business’s IT departments are growing by leaps and bounds and the work needed to add, integrate, and maintain can push IT resources to the limits. Virtualization was traditionally used to help reduce the number of servers needed to run the IT, but as the software became more advanced, the usefulness of having a Virtualized Desktop infrastructure (VDI) has become more apparent.