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July 2010

What is acceptable? The boundaries are shifting with technology, generational change and legal interpretations on privacy. Is it a productivity drain or a boon to communications in the corporate world?

Whatever it is, the increase in pervasiveness of personal items like i-phones and now i-pads as devices on corporate networks means policies are being set in the corporate world, for better or worse.

As a colleague responded when asked about his workplace policy on facebook, “its not about what they use, or how much time it takes, it’s about what they say”.

This is especially an issue when the poster forgets just how far their posts, tweets or videos will be viewed within their personal community.

Through this transition each organization policy that gets implemented contributes to the eventual consensus that will develop. Remember when email first became pervasive? Then browsing? Click here to read more on this topic.

Additional IT assessments available.

Sundata has established three new service offerings relating to business protection.

These offerings provide a formal review of three key areas of business protection provided by your IT infrastructure

Anti Virus
Backup
UPS

These three components of the IT environment are often implemented well then on occasion, not actively maintained or monitored, potentially leaving your organisation at risk.

Each review is designed to look at:

What should be protected,
Is it being protected and that
The protection solution is functioning correctly.

A written report is also provided giving the results and recommendations.

Normally, shortcoming in any of the above three areas only come to light under pressure. These review offerings are intended to optimise the performance in these areas at all times.

Virtualisation vendor synergies mean significant improvements.

VMWare and Netapp, two key Sundata vendors, have developed their co-existence to a higher level.

Netapp SAN solutions and VMWare, offer solutions that beneficially recognize each others existence within the virtualized environment.

Increased flexibility within the SAN environment combined with recognition of virtual rather than physical server resources, simplifies and makes more productive, the management of the combined resource.

Netapp have a fantastic website dedicated to this co-existence dynamic, with white papers, case studies and webcasts, amongst other resources. The white papers in particular are a valuable resource regardless of your use of Netapp or VMWare solutions.

For access to this website click here.

Sundata is a certified partner for both Netapp Storage solutions and Virtualisation solutions from VMWare.

Microsoft Office 2007 technology guarantee

If you purchased, installed, and activated a qualifying Microsoft Office 2007 product between March 5, 2010, and September 30, 2010, you are eligible to download Office 2010 at no additional cost.

If you are concerned about missing out on Office 2010 functionality if you buy Office 2007 products now, Microsoft can ease your concern by offering a no charge download of your Office 2010 product, when released.

If you would like to know more, click here.

Sundata is a Microsoft Gold partner with competencies in Server and Mid market solutions.

How far will tablet PC’s penetrate the corporate market?

Last week I attended two meetings where an attendee pulled out their i-pad and started taking notes. I was going to say ‘opened’ but that’s obviously not right.

Are they replacing laptops or netbooks? What are the implications for planning, security, wireless infrastructure? What are their shortcomings for hosting corporate applications?

The Australian IT section has an opinion piece this week with plenty of food for thought including timeframes for their ascendancy. While tablets have been around for many years, the i-pad is about to bring volume, a must have element, and plenty of new apps into the corporate space. To read the Australian IT article, click here.

Withdrawal of support for XP2 and other Microsoft products.

Tuesday, 13 July 2010, should be marked up in your diary if your organisation uses

· Windows XP SP2,

· Windows 2000 Professional or

· Windows Server 2000.

From this date, Microsoft will end support for these versions of their products as part of normal product life cycle policy. End of supports means there will be no more security updates for these versions*.

By now, Microsoft strongly recommends that:

· You have migrated to newer, supported versions of these products; or

· You have a plan to migrate soon; or

· You have investigated and accepted the risk associated with using unsupported products.

What are the risks?
Unsupported and unpatched environments are more vulnerable to security risks. Service packs include all previously released security updates at the time the service packs were released. They can also include additional security features, mitigations, or changes to default settings to help protect users. Microsoft provides complimentary security patches for supported products, but not for unsupported products.

Additionally, in the event that you encounter an issue/outage in your environment on an unsupported product, our engineers may not be able to help resolve this until you have upgraded to a supported level.

What are the options?

For Windows XP, there are two upgrade options: either deploy the latest Service Pack, SP3 or a more recent supported version of the OS, such as Windows 7.
For Windows 2000 Server, the upgrade options are Windows Server 2003 R2 or Windows Server 2008 R2. Windows Server 2008 R2 will be supported until 2018 and offers many advantages, particularly in the areas of virtualization, security and manageability.

Where can you find help or more information?

Full details of the product support lifecycle are available on the Microsoft website: http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle

Full details on the ending of support for Windows 2000 and Windows XP are also available at:
http://support.microsoft.com/win2000
http://support.microsoft.com/winxp

Network audit offering announced.

May 2010

Is documentation part of your Internal IT process or Project Methodology?

Evolution occurs in a workplace, a key staff member decides to leave, your experienced network administrator decides to become a rockstar, or someone simply takes holidays?

What happens when the critical knowledge is offline with the absent employee? The question arises - is key documentation available? And how do you successfully access and hand this over? This knowledge transfer may be business critical. It is also critical to senior management knowing that all that can be done to minimise risk, is done.

Documentation and simply accessible information is key as it ensures continuity for the organisation. Most organisations seek to minimise risks associated with any type of staff absence.

To ensure that we support this goal, Sundata offers a more sophisticated network audit, design and documentation outcome from a new toolset for use by Sundata consultants.

Netformx DeviceXpert provides us with functions to perform Enterprise AutoDiscovery (EAD).

A sample of output from our audit process is available here

EAD enables our engineers to quickly and accurately audit the network, and automatically identify topology, equipment, and configuration data down to specific nodes.

It can capture a baseline of existing equipment with the detailed specs for each device.

DesignXpert EAD Reports can assist during a planning or analysis phase by identifying EoX (End of Life, End of Support, etc) devices, IOS versions, insufficient resources and gaps in the discovered network.

Sundata can provide a network audit/discovery service as a stand-alone task, or as a prelude to assisting with planning network enhancements and upgrades.

For more information about our network audit offering, please contact Krishna or Watie on 3004 7333.

Video collaboration takes another step forward

Reinforcing the view that collaboration is moving well past email to encompass shared spaces and video communications, Cisco announces that the popular Webex business app is now available free on iPad.

iPad users can engage in robust Webex conferences wherever they are.

http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2010/prod_040210b.html

This announcement supports user feedback that people are seeking more than just email to support their collaboration efforts, including interactivity, video, shared spaces, messaging and of course social networking, as well as more prosaic needs such as larger mailboxes!

http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2010/prod_041310.html

For more information about how Sundata can help you with your Cisco infrastructure, please contact Krishna on 30047333.

Sundata adds further vendor certifications

IBM Storage

As part of Sundata’s ongoing efforts to strengthen skills and knowledge, Jonathan Fester recently completed certification as an IBM storage sales specialist, covering IBM N series and DS storage solutions.

Symantec

In addition, both Tony Bott and Craig Preston have recently completed their certifications for the following Symantec SMB solutions covering security, backup and anti virus solutions.

– Symantec™ Endpoint Protection

– Symantec Backup Exec™

– Symantec Backup Exec™ System Recovery

– Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition

– Symantec Protection Suite Enterprise Edition/Small Business Edition

WAN acceleration intangibles

What else can WAN optimisation do, apart from the obvious?

The majority of people know that WAN optimisation is designed to reduce the overall bandwidth needs across their network and to reduce cost pressures associated with delivering higher volumes and speeds to a significant branch presence. However what is the intangible benefit that no one realizes?

This case study provides an insight of how our customer Hastings Deering, who we have been working with for over 15 years, has experienced benefits not only in application acceleration and bandwidth optimization, but also intangible benefits such as increased productivity.

For more information on this case study or on how we can deliver a proof of Concept utilizing Cisco WAAS to maximize your WAN, please contact Krishna on 3004 7333.

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