Just met with the CEO of one of our new customers. As she explained to me why she decided to ditch her old vendor to move to our Fixed IT program, it occurred to me the tremendous amount of time she was actually saving herself.

You see, before Fixed IT, she would be charged hourly by her old vendor to contact manufacturers to solve warranty problems. Because of this charge (she got an invoice for over $400 to schedule Dell out to replace the screen in a laptop last year), she decided to have her team call for warranty issues. What she quickly found out was: “It took hours for my people to get to someone who could tell them what is wrong. Then, after we reached the right person in technical support, our people would be told that it was really another vendor’s issue. So we would start the entire process all over with the next vendor. Now, with Fixed IT, our people have one number to call.”

After this comment, I checked in with our Instant Support Team. On average, we deal with two customer warranty issues per day, and each one of these takes over three hours of phone time for our professionally trained IT team to solve. Wow! That is a ton of lost productivity for someone that doesn’t even really know what vendor to start with. No wonder we keep getting new Fixed IT customers who want us to support their computers.

Update: we signed up three new Fixed IT customers this week.

We were recently contracted by an architecture firm to restore their server after its Exchange database and Active Directory became corrupted. After looking over their bill (almost $4,000) I thought I would share with you the 2 critical mistakes that lead to their server outage, contributed to this company’s downtime (two days) and, ultimately, this unnecessary cost. Imagine being without your email, schedule, and critical files for two whole days!

1. Your Server Needs Correctly Configured Battery Backup. The corruption was caused when the server was not properly shutdown during a power outage. A simple uninterruptable power supply (UPS) configured to shut the server down would have prevented this entire issue. We often find that small businesses don’t invest in these devices or don’t set them up to shutdown the actual server. Most people think of their UPS as a battery to just keep their server running when the power goes out, but the issue is what happens when the battery runs out of juice. One of the major purposes of the device is to keep your server from an abrupt loss of power during a disk write, which causes data corruption like this in the first place.

2. Make Complete Backups (Test them and have a plan!). This firm was only backing up their files. To compound this issue, they were only backing up what they thought was their critical data. This means that they were not able to restore the entire server with its configuration. Instead, we had to reinstall the server’s software, configure it, and then restore the data. Luckily we were able to get everything they needed back without having to do an expensive data recovery process. Data recovery of a server starts around $10,000.

Like many small businesses this firm had never practiced their restore process, nor did they have a disaster recovery plan. Folks, it is the middle of the summer, and thunderstorms are upon us. You need to check your UPS devices to make sure they are adequate and configured properly. If you have any questions about this, or would like us to put together a Disaster Recovery plan, contact your Dynamic Edge consultant. If you would always like the peace of mind that your computer system is being handled, call the office and talk to Debra about Fixed IT.

On Tuesday night the Dynamic Edge team took a break from server administration, computer support, and programming to get back to the basics. In this case, I am talking about the game we all spent our lunches and bus rides playing: Euchre. The competition was cut throat as there were prizes for first and last place.

As you can see from one of my many awesome hands, Bruce didn’t take first place at this year’s Euchre tournament. Jason Tomsic received the $50 Best Buy gift certificate for first place…and…ummm…yeah…Skyler Willet took home the $5 McDonalds bucks for last place.

This was quite the upset because we all thought that Deb would be bringing home the McDonalds for getting last place. This was the second time in history she played the game and kept getting mixed up on what was trump. Oh well Skyler, guess you should stick to web design!

WARNING: You could be making these Summertime Slip-Ups with your company’s server! (AND DATA!)

Excess heat is a huge problem for all of the equipment in your server room; it is even bad for laptops and Desktops. If proper attention isn’t given to your server and network equipment during the summer, all the heat outside can cause serious damage to your server, frying your system- literally!

Here are few steps you can take to insure that your server equipment and network don’t overheat this summer:

• Tidy up the server room; an uncluttered space will increase air flow. (Not to mention, a clean server room is easier to work in. If you have cables everywhere it’s easy to unplug the wrong one, and cause an outage.)
• Arrange multiple servers in a row so that the cold air comes from the front and is expelled out the back.
• Use a redundant A/C that is specifically designed for computers.
• Consider a rack enclosure with a built in cooling system.
• Install a temperature monitor that can automaticlly email you when your server room gets too hot; we like to use the one by APC.
• Keep the temperature below 77 degrees.
• Make sure you keep the doors to the server room closed, the seal prevents dust from entering the space and building up. Dust contributes to electronic equipment overheating by clogging up and slowing down fans.
• If you have any empty spaces on your server rack, install blanking panels to fill them. Empty spaces in your rack reduce air flow.
• Consider virtualization as tool to reduce the amount of heat in your server room, by reducing the number of servers.

Hope everyone is having a great summer, and let us know if you would like us to schedule a network audit and come out to take a look at your server room. Cheers!