SMB Nation - MVP Show

Hey All - This is Lynn Shourds, President & CTO of HEROware. This is just a quick note to tell you all about the Microsoft MVP Show in Seattle with SMB Nation.

This is the second day and I've got to tell you, this is an impressive group. These MVP's really know their stuff and it's very helpful to hear their input, along with their feedback on our products as well as competing products in this market.

Harry Brelsford and his team (namely Jennifer, Tiara, Chris, Sue and Matt) have done a terrific job at hosting this event. The party last night was fun and the company was even bettter.

If you haven't met Harry and his team, be sure to reach out and introduce yourself. You can find them at http://www.smbnation.com/.

Thanks for listening -

Lynn

Take a look at what we do at http://www.heroware.com/

HEROware: Simple Steps for Contingency Planning, Home and Work

Hey All - this is Lynn Shourds, President & CTO of HEROware. Many companies think of contingency planning as a massive project that is so big they'll never be able to accomplish it. But, if you think of contingency planning at work in the same light as your daily contingency planning at home, you'll see that it's the little things that really make a difference. According to a nice article at GIGAOM, "If you haven’t thought about setting up a formal contingency plan to outline the steps you need to take now in case something happens to you, you could be jeopardizing your livelihood".

 

Let's start on the premise that a contingency plan's formula could look something like this: If x then I'm prepared with y.

Let's start at home. I live in Southern California where it never rains...not this week. It's been raining cats and dogs for 8 days. But as a daily contingency plan for rain (x) I have two umbrella's (y) in my trunk. Now that may seem a simple example but that is a contingency plan. In Southern California we also have earthquakes (x). They are very few and far between but we have to be planned for them. So, in my garage I have a cupboard filled with water, batteries, flashlight, and radio (y). I'll give one more example. When I'm playing golf, if I start playing poorly (x), then I start drinking beer (y). So you see, we all have daily contingency plans for many of life's "what ifs". There's no reason not to be prepared in your business as well.

Let's start with the little things. Make sure you have redundant copies of your business data. In case of disaster (x) make sure you have a copy off-site (y).

Since communication is the life-blood of most companies, make sure your email is redundant. Don't just rely on your local email server. What happens if it goes down or you lose it in a fire (x)? Executives need to communicate with employees and sales needs to communicate with customers. Since email is this important, make sure you have a redundant off-site email plan (y), one that can continue even in a disaster.

These are a few very simple steps any company can take to begin a contingency plan. Remember, you're doing it in your daily life, isn't it time to take these simple steps to work?

Thanks for listening-

Lynn
>see how HEROware can help with your contingency plans at www.heroware.com 

10 Trains, Planes, and Automobiles...and a Bus!

Hey All - this is Lynn Shourds, President & CTO of HEROware. I quickly want to share my unique journey last week.

As you can imagine, I travel a lot for work. However, last week's trip to Seattle to visit with Harry Brelsford and the SMB Nation Team had one remarkable transportation day in it.

My multiple modes of transportation in this one day far and away surpassed any one day for me ever. To quote the late Lawrence Welk, it went a "little something like this":

5:00 AM - Automobile (1) to OC airport
6:45 AM - Airplane (2) Alaska Air to Seattle
10:00 AM - Train (3) from Terminal E to Main Terminal (yes, I know, this is a stretch)
10:30 AM - Taxi (4) to Microsoft in Redmond
12:00 PM - Walk (5) to Microsoft Commons for lunch with Kevin Kelly (hang in there)
3:00 PM - Taxi (6) to Bellevue for a partner meeting
5:30 PM - City Bus (7) across Mercer Island to downtown Seattle for Dinner with Harry Brelsford
9:00 PM - Automobile (8) to Bainbridge Ferry
10:00 PM - Ferry (9) to Bainbridge Island
11:00 PM - Automobile (10) to my room


View Larger Map

I'm actually disappointed that I didn't get to ride a bike or take a rickshaw during this trek, but all in all I'd say that's a good day of travel.

I'm done sharing now...have a great day.

Lynn
>check us out at http://www.heroware.com/

Business Continuity - Keeping it Real

Hey All - this is Lynn Shourds, President and CTO of HEROware. When you're talking about Business Continuity it's important to keep in mind the Cost vs. Functionality quotient.


At an enterprise level, end users are not typically concerned with costs. They know that a high-end business continuity solution is going to cost them dollars. And, for these increased dollars they expect lower RPO’s (Recovery Point Objectives) and lower RTO’s (Recovery Time Objectives). However, if they’re mindful of costs, there are technologies available to give them a very low RPO and very low RTO.

Let’s examine the options. We all know that tape backup is going to be at the bottom end of the chart in terms of both RPO and RTO. If we agree that tape is at the bottom, then let’s agree that some form of active/active cluster is at the top. Agreed? Well, since you can’t answer I’ll take that as a yes.

What, then, is in the middle? In the middle we have disk to disk backup, snapshot technology, and asynchronous replication. Let’s look closer. Disk to disk backup is using tape backup technology, just backing up to disk instead of tape. There is still a restore from a proprietary file format involved for recovery. Snapshots are incremental “pictures” of data/system and require a restore. Asynchronous replication is a byte by byte mirroring of the changes only (deltas). These three technologies all have varying RPO and RTO times.

Of the three, however, asynchronous replication brings the biggest bang for the buck. The RPO with asynchronous replication is nearly zero, especially if the replication is taking place on the LAN. The reason for this is every byte-level change is being replicated in real-time as the change takes place on the production server. Because it’s asynchronous replication, there is no hold up of any CPU cycles waiting for a commit on the backup side. Instead, buffers are built in to verify the files have been written, continuously and with write-order preservation.

But, how about RTO you ask? Let’s examine. We’ve already agreed that tape RTO is long because of restoration from that tape and its effective percentage relative to success rates. And we know that an active/active cluster can be very fast, yet not very affordable and it takes significant engineering skills to maintain. So, what about disk-to-disk backups ? Disk to disk backups require a restoration, either to a new physical box or to a virtual session that needs to be built out. Again, it’s tape backup technology just built for disk instead. From the engineers I know and I have spoken with, this can be a guessing game it terms of will it recover or won’t it. Many of them are moving away from this technique and these solutions.

Next we have snapshots. Microsoft has done a nice job with VSS. Snapshots have become a very popular solution and are considered a very good “second” line of defense in your business continuity strategy. Depending on the vendor you can recover these snapshots in various ways, and restore them usually to a virtual machine.

Again, replication technologies typically have faster RTO. The reason for this is that when data is replicated asynchronously it resides in Windows Native File Format. Because there doesn’t have to be a conversion process, these RTO’s can be seconds to minutes.

Even within a single replication technology there can be varying RTO’s. Take Double-Take Software for example. Their RPO's remain extremely low since the underlying asynchronous replication is the same across all platforms. However, because Double-Take uses their technology to vary the costs, the RTO is different depending on, wait for it, yes I did, I’ve brought it back to the opening paragraph…the RTO is different depending on the “Cost vs. Functionality Quotient".

Let me explain. In a typical multi-server environment, there are usually at least 3 Tiers of redundancy needs. The Tier 1 being application servers that need to be up and running within minutes should there be planned or unplanned downtime. Tier 2 being servers that could be down for several minutes to an hour, and Tier 3 for servers that could be down for hours at a time.


Double-Take Software from Vision Solutions has taken these three tiers, with their varying RTO’s, and given the user choices based on how much they want to pay for their individual RTO needs.

For the highest cost you’ll get application-level failover that happens in seconds to minutes. For the next highest dollar amount you’ll get whole-server failover that happens in several minutes. And lastly, for the least amount of money you get replicated backup (Native Windows File Format) that restores to physical or virtual servers in several minutes to a couple hours (depending on size).

This is what I’m talking about when I refer to “Keeping it Real”. You must realize what you get for what you pay. In the big scheme of things, the lowest cost (Tier 3) is plenty good enough for 80% of companies. However, should you need to get your RTO closer to zero minutes, it’s nice to know it’s available to you, it’s just going to cost you a few more bucks.

Thanks for listening-

Lynn

>check out all the Business Continuity options we have at HEROware

HEROware: Trade Shows - are they worth it?

Hey All - this is Lynn Shourds, President & CTO of HEROware. We recently attended the SMB Nation Fall Conference in Las Vegas. This was the 5th show we attended this year and looking back, it's time to talk about the ROI of doing these types of shows.

We all know that trade shows can be expensive, and according to a really terrific ROI report from American Image, those fees include "...show fees, airfare in many cases, hotel stays, meals and wages, not to mention the actual display."

However, trade shows are successful in many ways; namely 3: PR, Branding, and Sales. Of these three, sales always gets the most attention. But don't be fooled, the PR and Branding associated with trade shows pays massive dividends down the road. Sure, they're not as flashy and in-your-face as sales are, but no company can thrive and survive without them.



Candy Adams - "Booth Mom"

 American Image talks about ROO (Return on Objectives) and ROR (Return on Relationships) as being strong factors in measuring the success of a trade show. “A lot of events that we do these days have to do with ongoing relationships with people and upselling,” says Candy Adams, known as the Booth Mom. “Too many people are using a shotgun approach, saying it’s a numbers game. Numbers are nice, but give me a focused group of people — this is where the rubber meets the road, is these relationships, this ROR.” It may seem difficult to measure these types of variables, but it can, and should, be done.

So how were the shows for us? Well, sales were increased, and nicely I might add. But for me, the Branding associated with trade shows is King. The chance for thousands of resellers and end-users to see our brand, and get to know who we are and what we do is where I measure our greatest success. I'm a huge fan of ROR. The culture of our company is key to how we do business and how we treat our customers and partners. This culture is very entrepreneurial and overflowing with customer service and caring about every reseller, customer and technology partner.

So I would say YES...trade shows are worth it. Factor in your leads with your relationship building and throw on top some branding success and you've got a the equivalent of a triple-scoop ice cream sundae with extra fudge and whipped cream. I don't know about you, but that's really good for me!

Thanks for listening,

Lynn
>check out what we do at http://www.heroware.com/

HEROware: Best Practices for Disaster Recovery

Hi All - this is Lynn Shourds, President & CTO of HEROware. Today I'm going to talk off the top of my head about best practices for Disaster Recovery (DR).

DR is a term which is often confused with other pieces of the Business Continuity (BC) model. Let's first examine that model: BC requires local high availability (HA), off-site disaster recovery, and long-term archiving for mass data retention and compliance. The confusion usually starts here. As you can read, DR is one component of the BC model.

So let's suffice to say that your business has some sort of local HA. That HA is where 90% or so of outages happen. Local outages, if not prepared for, can costs company's thousands of dollars. Thanks to North American Systems International, who has provided an easy way to calculate the cost of downtime, using the following equation to calculate the average labor cost of an outage:

LABOR COST = P x E x R x H

Where:

P = number of people affected

E = average percentage they are affected

R = average employee cost per hour

H = number of hours of outage

As companies depend more and more on computer applications for day-to-day business operations, the cost of downtime has increased. The simplest way to calculate potential revenue losses during an outage is with the equation:

LOST REVENUE = (GR x TH) x I x H

Where:

GR = gross yearly revenue

TH = total yearly business hours

I = percentage impact

H = number of hours of outage

Service costs are rarely zero.

So now you can see, I've talked about BC and that is not DR. DR, as nicely described by a Wikipedia entry as, "...the process, policies and procedures related to preparing for recovery or continuation of technology infrastructure critical to an organization after a natural or human-induced disaster".  

I like the part about "human-induced disaster." I bet many of you didn't know that a common threat to many companies are its employees. Accidental misuse of technology by systems administrators cost companies hours of downtime. Additionally, the oh-so-loved disgruntled employee can take a company down in minutes. It is these disasters, along with fires, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, snow storms, and Godzilla that prove the need for Disaster Recovery.

Well then, you say, how is it one properly prepares for these disasters? It's not that hard. You need to at least get your data off-site so you don't lose important company and customer information should you encounter one of the above disasters. Cloud storage and server recovery options are now available to aid you in your DR plans. If you want your company to survive a full company disaster, then it is imperative that you get your act together.

Business owners have spent countless hours and money building a company, hiring employees, and keeping the economy going.  Why risk all that hard work and sweat by not following some very basic Business Continuity tenets? Work on your DR plans now...you'll thank me later.

Thanks for listening,

Lynn
>check out how we can help your DR and BC plans at www.heroware.com

HEROware: email continuity

Hey All - this is Lynn Shourds, President & CTO of HEROware. More and more companies rely heavily on their email systems for communication internally and externally. Email has become the top of the priority list in terms of tier-ing out a company's most critical applications.


Companies have now integrated accounting, manufacturing, and business to business operations into their email systems, especially when it comes to Microsoft Exchange Server. Because of this, the dependency on email has become the life-blood of many companies throughout horizontal markets worldwide. According to ITSecurity.com, "...emails are not just for idle chatting, but can also be used to make legally binding contracts, major financial decisions, and conduct professional meetings."

So how should email be protected? There are three sides to this question. One, requires that you have a backup of your email so you can recover email from accidental deletion, modifications, or viruses. Two, demands that there be some form of continuity so your company can recover quickly and easily from an email server outage. And three, there should be long-term archiving of email for compliance reasons. These archives should be available for long-term recovery of individual emails, or whole email boxes, or entire email databases. Additionally, these types of archives should have the capability to configure legal holds in case of a law suit or other legal action.

Email is nice to have. When email goes down, everyone knows...especially the Executive Team. So do yourself a favor, make sure you're protected both from email issues and for job security!

Thanks for listening,

Lynn
>check out how HEROware protects your email in all 3 ways by clicking here.