Feb
23
2010

NaviSite now features Xeon 5500 series high performance CPUs in Managed Dedicated Servers

by Sumeet Sabharwal

Staying ahead of the demand for server resources is a constant battle in our broadband-connected society. The good news for end-users and service providers is that the fight just got a little easier with the high powered Xeon Nehalem CPUs on workstation blade technology. Now hosted applications and websites benefit from the top performance of Core i7 processors.

Intel’s successor to Core 2 CPUs, the new Xeon 5500 series chips feature expanded cache, a Quick Path Interface and a DDR3 memory controller integrated with the CPU core. When combined with Blade technology, customers enjoy advantages like redundant power supplies and reboot capabilities, in addition to the blazing speed of Intel’s latest and greatest.

Critics and technology pundits agree- Intel’s Xeon Nehalem CPUs raise the bar on power and performance. Here are some reactions around the web-
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Dec
22
2009

Reliability: The Holiday Season and Ecommerce trap – when downtime equals lost sales, and uptime equals lost revenues

by Sumeet Sabharwal

Holiday shopping season is crunch time for many businesses dependent on the revenues generated between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. Increasingly, a large percentage of those sales are via online channels. IT infrastructure and availability is under the microscope, and lost sales from poor performing or offline servers compound an already high average Cost of Downtime (CoD). The question is: how can you accurately calculate those losses in order to responsibly protect your business. Understanding true downtime losses are the key to qualifying your availability requirements.

The tangible, obvious numbers are easy. Take the average daily sales total, multiply it by the percentage increase for seasonal holiday sales, multiply that number by hours or days of downtime, and you have a nice, easily understood price tag. It’s not the most accurate price tag however, and therein lays the danger. Intangible costs can ripple and escalate in unexpected and very expensive ways.

Let’s consider an imaginary SMB that sells a popular gadget. They have a shopping cart section of the website that moves 1,000 gadgets a day at a price of $10.00 per gadget.

1,000 gadgets X $10.00 = $10,000 per day in gross online revenue
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Oct
29
2009

NaviSite- The real cost of running a server In-house

by Sumeet Sabharwal

It’s not exactly news that running a web or application server in-house is an expensive proposition for any company, and especially for resource tight SMBs and startups. Hardware and software costs, hiring and/or training personnel to deploy and manage the server, and bandwidth are minimum requirements, and cutting corners in any of these areas courts disaster. Despite an intimidating high cost of entry, deploying an in-house server is still desirable for a number of reasons, most centered around security concerns or flexibility needs. Those advantages come with an element of risk, and businesses who don’t carefully consider the hidden costs in running a web or application server in-house could find any benefits negated in revenue draining budget shortfalls.

Hardware costs should be straightforward to identify, although deciding whether to purchase or lease is much less cut and dry. Purchasing hardware outright may cost less over time, but it also depreciates quickly and businesses can find themselves still paying off equipment that is losing performance ground to newer deployments. Leasing can offer more flexible options, but that typically comes at a premium price.
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Oct
6
2009

What CDN can mean for your Business

by Sumeet Sabharwal

There’s an old axiom that essentially states, that our computing power doubles every couple of years. Not surprisingly, we manage to utilize that capacity about as quickly. In our post-Web 2.0 environment, with broadband network connectivity and terabyte sized disk drives becoming ubiquitous, we’re moving around more data faster than ever before. The promise of a rich media Web has been realized, and it isn’t only media companies that are distributing large amounts of data. Multimedia audio and video are certainly popular, but there are a myriad of other types of downloads that we perform regularly- software and application updates, manuals and PDF collateral, image libraries, games, articles, and more. Regardless of the core nature of your business, if you have a Web presence, the chances are good that you are distributing a significant amount of digital content. If you are, you could benefit from CDN services.

A CDN (Content Distribution Network) works under a simple but effective premise, tried and true by its retail distribution cousin- speed up deliveries by putting products, or in our this case digital content, closer to customers. Amazon is a textbook example of how this works, no pun intended. From their humble beginnings in Seattle, Amazon now has distribution centers around the globe, stocking popular items and allowing for fast deliver to shoppers. This not only increases customer satisfaction, but over time it provides a notable savings in fulfillment costs.

Digital content distribution can benefit from the same model. Rather than putting a file on a server and having users download it from a single source, CDN services intelligently push content to the edges of the network, where the end users are. Here’s why that’s important- just because the internet makes it easy for anyone to ‘virtually’ drive up to your office and pick up a brochure or a copy of a video, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea in practice, especially when you can save the trip for a large number of those customers.
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Sep
15
2009

Small Business Strategies to Limit the Risk and Affects of Data Loss

by Sumeet Sabharwal

Preventing unplanned downtime and business failure.

Protecting your business data is more important than ever due to all the catastrophic, unforeseen events that can damage or destroy your data permanently. Customer data, accounts payable, invoices, email and historical communications and business applications are the backbone of your company. Without your business data, your business could not move forward on a day to day basis. Imagine not being able to access your business data for an hour, a day, a month or possibly forever. Now you can protect your small business from data loss, prevent unplanned downtime, and prevent business failure. NaviSite, a leading dedicated and managed hosting services company, shows you how vulnerable your data can be without the proper backup plan in place.

Please Click Here to access the complete White paper and Learn how you can protect your business and focus on what you do best

Aug
12
2009

SaaS application hosting- the secret to controlling IT costs

by Sumeet Sabharwal

A tighter economy has been a recurring theme for the last few years, and the businesses that have successfully adapted to the new economic reality have come out leaner and better equipped to react quickly to new trends and opportunities. Regardless of a particular industry or market niche, these businesses have taken similar approaches to key processes, and chief among them is a trend towards outsourcing costly, IT heavy initiatives and operations.

Here’s the paradox- it doesn’t matter what product or services you sell, success in the 21st century marketplace is largely dependent on efficient and flexible IT solutions. The upshot of this is businesses have to make a choice- hire and train the personnel and acquire the hardware and bandwidth needed to deploy and manage all their IT needs in house, or outsource those needs to a quality application host. SMBs that don’t have money to burn smartly turn to outsourcing as the answer.

SaaS, or Software as a Service, takes an end user perspective on what software should accomplish and the best way to deliver on those requirements. To take a simplistic view- people don’t want to own word processing software, they want to create and edit documents. Purchasing and installing a word processing application (as well as the computer to run it on) are the steps needed to do that, and until recently that’s been the only option.
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Jul
24
2009

Why your Business Email needs a Top Notch Data Center

by Sumeet Sabharwal

For most businesses operating in a web enabled marketplace, e-mail has replaced the phone system as the communications nerve center. If you don’t think so, imagine which one you could do without for a day. As one of a business’ most valuable and important resources, it presents some challenges when it comes to how and where to manage it. Commercial e-mail like Gmail or AOL isn’t an option for anyone that wants to be taken seriously, and unless you already have significant bandwidth, hardware, and 24-7 staffing, running it in house isn’t really an option.

The decision to outsource e-mail may be an easy one, but the implementation is much less cut and dry. Shared hosting versus dedicated, basic POP mail service versus full featured Exchange hosting, there are solutions to fit organizations and budgets of any size. Regardless of the solution you’re considering for your business, there’s a common question you should be asking- what kind of data center will my mail be hosted in?

In a very tangible sense, the data center is a tremendous portion of the overall value of a mail service, and yet, it is frequently the least considered one, lost is a sea of price points and feature sets. Often it’s the quality of the data center that makes the difference between poor and excellent e-mail service.
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Jul
16
2009

Hosted Exchange and BlackBerry- Enterprise Communications for SMBs

by Sumeet Sabharwal

The iPhone may be the center of attention at the smart phone party right now, but when it’s time to get down to business, the leader remains the BlackBerry. Even the top executive in the country famously has his own souped up model. The BlackBerry has become ubiquitous in companies all over America, and it’s not an exaggeration to suggest that business would halt if people’s Blackberries stopped working (the proof being a notorious outage of a couple years ago).

With the entrenchment of the BlackBerry in the business world, it’s surprising how few SMBs have fully integrated it with their larger business communications solution. To put it another way, if your employees use Blackberries and you aren’t using hosted BlackBerry services along with Microsoft Exchange Server with Active Sync, you’re missing out on some big advantages.

The BlackBerry rose to dominate the business world primarily based on one killer app: it was and still is an easy to use e-mail appliance that fits in your pocket. It’s funny and not a little surprising then that millions of business people use this handy little e-mail machine to access an e-mail system that it’s totally separate and disconnected from their corporate mail. They go through a complicated daily process of forwarding mail from desktop to hand held and back again, with multiple copies of documents in multiple places and creating a management headache that magnifies geometrically with any serious volume of mail to deal with. The solution to this is by using Exchange and Active Sync in conjunction with hosted BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES).
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Jul
10
2009

Benefits of Hosted MS SQL

by Sumeet Sabharwal

When it comes to databases and small businesses, it’s safe to say that most SMBs are built on SQL. Regardless of flavor, the open source MySQL or Microsoft’s MS SQL, the SQL relational database language has become de facto for millions of business applications. That established pedigree also comes with a frequently debated question: how can administrators and company decision makers’ best decide which to use?

The thing that makes MySQL attractive to startups is the same thing that works against it as a business becomes more and more successful- it’s open source software. For new companies it means no licensing fees and a rich open source community. For SMBs with revenue dependant databases, it means no vendor support and limited native interoperability with other entrenched business applications. When salaries, shareholder’s dividends and operating capital is on the line, that’s a deal breaker.

It’s one thing to say “there are unlimited resources in the open source community.” It’s another thing to be looking at a corrupted database that’s crashed, halting sales and bleeding revenue and perhaps losing valuable customer and billing information in the process. The value of the vendor partner relationship is clearly evident when the chips are down. You don’t handle your business accounting without professional support. Your critical database infrastructure should receive the same care.
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Jul
1
2009

Entourage 2008 and Exchange- The Solution for Designers

by Sumeet Sabharwal

In the business world, design and media firms occupy a unique space. They are the quirky, creative cousin of the corporate worker, a necessary piece of the commerce puzzle but frequently the t-shirt wearing free spirit in a room full of suits and ties. Nowhere is this more evident than is the choice of computers. Setting aside the Mac versus PC argument, the fact remains that Apple computers dominate the media world for a good reason- they do those jobs very well. The flip side to that equation is the Apple platform hasn’t been historically as well supported when it comes to business applications. IT administrators for design houses have been forced to choose between running substandard ports of native PC applications and maintaining a dual operating system environment. When it comes to centralized business communications, there’s a better option- Entourage 2008 and Hosted Exchange.

Fully integrated with the other Office applications, Entourage 2008 gives users powerful e-mail, task and calendar management, and in conjunction with Exchange server allows users anywhere, anytime access to critical information. With built in sync support for Address Book, iCal, and .MAC services, and ActiveSync capabilities through Exchange to push data to iPhone, Palm Pre, and Blackberry devices, Entourage 2008 lives up to the promise of business ready powerful communications in a native Mac OS environment. Entourage 2008 is a Universal Binary application, able to run on both PowerPC and x86 processors.
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