OK, I’m showing my musical tastes here by coining an album title from one of my favourite bands for this article (Ride the Lightning) but it is relevant to the subject namely power protection. We are here to make sure that your business can ride the lightning out.

As we move into spring and summer electrical storms often become more common. There are actually two threats that come with the storms, lightning strikes and flooding. The events in Gloucestershire in 2007 are probably an extreme but marked reminder of the damage flood water can cause (see the Google photo search photos here). The effects of this can be slightly more gradual that lightning strikes and are really part of a business’s Business Continuity Planning and Disaster Recovery (BC & DR) procedures. However those businesses supplied by the electrical sub-station which eventually got submerged during those floods of 2007 suffered the loss of power – probably a lot further a field that the flood waters area of effect.

The point of power protection is to avoid the power being over, or under, supplied spontaneously to your critical systems, or more specifically your servers. Over voltage can seriously damage your equipment, under voltage or what is known as a brownout, or dropout will cause unprotected systems to unceremoniously restart. Although the newer Microsoft operating systems (Windows 2003 Server) and database applications (Exchange Server and SQL Server) have tended to be more resilient to being simply turned off (rather than shutdown in an orderly process) than their earlier counter parts, it is still not good practice to do this. Better that they are shutdown through the proper procedure so that they can flush and close out their transaction data cleanly.

With a suitable Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS) unit protecting your servers and orderly shutdown can be arranged for the systems in the event that the main power supply is taken out by a loss of power – caused by whatever means. The unit is also designed to protect the attached equipment from a lightning strike sending a spike down power lines which could seriously damage you systems. Also don’t forget that in areas with overhead telephone lines the voltage spikes can come down the telephone line as well wreaking as much damage as those that arrive down power lines.

Before we take on the role of supporting clients we conduct an initial assessment of a site to ensure that critical systems have some form of power protection. As part of our on-going Pro-Active Essentials Plus and Managed Service support services we regularly test those protection systems, making sure that the equipment is function properly and that the batteries have sufficient life left in them to do their job.

A timely subject with the approach of Easter. It is the time of year for dealing with bunnies, dust, not Easter bunnies that is. For those that don’t know a dust bunny is that ball of fluff that collects in the bottom of your computer case which blocks the inlets and cooling fans. These along with the dirt that builds up and settles on the electronic components impedes their ability to dissipate heat. As we round the end of the year and the environmental temperatures are low this does not present such an issue so any such build-ups generally go un-noticed. However as we reach Easter and beyond, and the outside temperature starts to rise this reduced cooling efficiency could be the last gasp of an old machine. 

One of the services we include in our Managed Service solution is the annual cleaning of dust bunnies, specifically conducted around this time of year. Removing the computer cover to inspect the state of dust build up, and to check that fans are still turning, could catch that event which could lead to the demise of your computer. Inspecting and replacing noisy fans could also remove that annoying background noise and restore the tranquility to your office (note: This service doesn’t cover noisy colleagues however!).

Catch those bunnies before they spell the end of your computer.

A close associate of mine Chris Clark of Clark Marketing posed some interesting questions about how ready Vista really is for the business world. He cited reports of poor performance and hibernation issues, a CD burning problem, issues with DRM and driver problems as just some of the gremlins plaguing Vista currently.

We have been working with Vista now for about 6 months and have not been presented with many of these issues. Our lack of exposure to these problems may have resulted from working with Vista on the right hardware platform – yes, the equipment expectations have been raised but having them in place does make the difference! Laptop hibernation has been one area where I would say Vista has improved substantially.

However I definitely concur on the driver issue; this has been our main pain point. I’m not entirely sure how much criticism for the lack of drivers should be levelled at Microsoft. Equipment manufacturers have known this was coming for a long time, but there seems to have been less preparation than that which was apparent during the Windows 2000 to XP transition era. Maybe it is simply our perception of the situation, or perhaps the equipment vendors sense a sales opportunity?

Having just completed a Vista workstation and Small Business Server network installation I would have to describe our relationship with Vista as love/hate. Some things are great; others just don’t work well at all (Drive mapping through Group Policy to name one).

How do I sum up my current thoughts on Vista? Vista is the immature teenager to XP’s mature and experienced adult – you can see Vista has a lot of promise and is the future, providing it doesn’t terminate itself before coming of age, but once in a while it leaves you thinking “what the heck are you doing now?” Maybe the imminent release of Service Pack 1 (SP1) will be Vista’s coming of age?

What do you use to protect your systems from virus activity? How about spyware and intrusion prevention? Trojans? What about rootkits? Do you use the same password for lots of different accounts? Would you recognise the fact that your system has been infected by some form of malware?

As the article at CompTIA concludes the threat landscape is changing and the speed at which new vulnerabilities are being exploited is increasing.

There appears to be no silver bullet to these problems, there are however best practices with which to mitigate your exposure to these threats. Patching both operating systems and applications, and using a good quality security software suite are part of this defence strategy. Also, you not only have to be in possession of the software; you have to use it, update it and review what it is telling you. These issues, amongst others, are addressed in our Pro-Active support services.

Best practices may not be the ultimate answer but they will go a long way to making your systems more difficult to compromise than someone else’s. So, how is your security?

When talking to potential clients about new servers, software or system installations one of the most common obstacles we come up against is initial cost. When totalling up the cost of software, equipment,  services and consultancy fees the price can easily run to several thousand pounds. This can make a significant dent in small businesses cash flow and can block them from getting their hands on the tools and facilities that can be enablers for their business.

There are a number of ways that businesses can finance these projects. As Microsoft certified partners we have access to Microsoft financing solutions which offers another route to getting those projects rolling.

I was asked recently by a client “why we specify Dell” systems when selecting hardware. Our answer was “many reasons”, and it is not just cost alone that drives the decision. It also need to be stated that we are not averse to looking at other brands, especially when the client asking the question has a significant installed base from another manufacturer.

One of our recommendations to clients is to standardise on a particular equipment manufacturer for a number of reason, the primary reason being that they have a single point of warranty support contact which makes management of IT equipment more straight forward.

Our knowledge of Dell equipment is good as we have worked with their servers and workstations for many years. We also have good communication channels with Dell for sales and support.

Finally, but this is by no means the complete dialogue on this subject, we do look at the amount of consideration given to environmental issues. Dell is showing a strong drive in this area (www.dell.co.uk/earth) and is one of the higher rated companies on the Greenpeace site as of the writing of this article.

We are currently looking at how we can be more involved in the green action plan (www.globalactionplan.org.uk) which was brought to our attention by Computing magazines article and their green initiative which we have signed up to.