For us, hosting is kind of an invisible value-added service. It’s part of our strategy to help small businesses leverage cloud computing.

Instead of purchasing and owning complex server resources themselves, we do it for our customers and we do it a lot cheaper than what they could do for themselves. The stuff we host also becomes available to them anywhere across the Internet. We make it simple for our clients.

When I first started hosting, the business was oriented around physical assets: what we call “iron” servers. These days, we don’t really pick up physical servers like the ones you see here, but instead create virtual servers on much larger computers. Admittedly, I have more virtual servers than “iron” servers these days.

Finally, a colo (co-location) is a secure facility with backup power and temperature-controlled environments. Our colo, Opus Interactive, recently opened their new, state-of-the-art facility in downtown Portland, requiring us to move our physical servers to the new facility this last weekend. The picture that you see here is the last of our “iron” servers racked-up in the new colo space.

Secure, professional, dedicated, and delivering enterprise-class capability to small business – that’s what we do.

R

On this blog, I often talk about the times where I’m called in to save data. Well, sometimes, I’m called in to play executioner.

A few weeks ago, I lined up a bunch of PC’s that I had to wipe for an upcoming liquidation, and one-by-one, I ran through a process to wipe the drives and permanently destroy their data. This has to be done with a specific kind of software utility.

You see, if you FORMAT, SYS, FDISK, or DELETE a file system on a fixed disk, there are ways data can be recovered by seeking the drive and rebuilding its indexes. You can scan the drive and recompile pointers to the file … hence the idea that data is never truly deleted.

Now, to sanitize a drive to military spec DoD 5220.22-M, you have to fill every addressable location on the drive with a random garbage character. That prevents those indexes from being recompiled. You need special software for that, and I use it to secure my client’s intellectual property while divesting or retiring microcomputer assets.

So even if you’re looking for somebody to help destroy data rather than save it, I can help you with that, too!

R

Right around the holidays Eric had a big problem.

His server went belly-up and more than 250gb of client data became inaccessible to him!

Yikes!

After a while, it looked like there wasn’t going to be a fix for the server – it was dead on arrival. Still, Eric needed his data off of the machine so he could get back to work. So he gave me a call.

It took a little doing because his data was spread across three hard disks, but in a few hours, my team was able to access the drive and recover the data. I drove it over to him the next day and gave him access to it through an external drive.

Eric told me that he’s going sleep better tonight knowing he’s got his mission-critical files! And next up with him: probably a conversation about our online backup product!

R

Before he met me, he was trying to login to his work PC remotely on his Mac. It was a hit-or-miss situation. All of his critical files, contact information, email, and appointments were on his PC.

Meanwhile, his Blackberry would only be as current as the last time he plugged it in to his PC at work to synchronize.

So you can probably understand his problem. Jason was out helping clients. He wasn’t at work to sit down at his PC and it’d take a pretty long time to get some basic work done.

Well, we took care of SW Office Systems by bringing their whole shop on to Google Apps. This allowed for Jason’s email, calendar, and contacts to move effortlessly between his PC, Mac, and Blackberry. Then we used Dropbox to sync critical files across all of those devices, too. Now he doesn’t need his PC to get work done. In short, we made the data he needs to do his job available to him anywhere. That makes  Jason more productive and in-sync with his client’s needs out in the field – where he’s needed most.

Today I was out at SW Office Systems and I asked him how it was going. All he said was, “Awesome”, “Great”, and “No problems!” Well, okay – you can’t argue with that.

R

What are the top 5 IT problems for small businesses?

What are the top 5 IT problems for small businesses?

How do I know if I am addicted to information on the web and not really deriving lot of value from it?

You likely have a mobile phone. That’s a screen. Perhaps a pad or tablet computer. That’s also a screen.

You might also have a laptop or a desktop computer. Those are screens.

Televisions, movie players, game stations and consoles. Screens.

Each of the screens are updating us, notifying us, giving us information – 99.9 percent of which our brain just classifies as “trivial” and doesn’t even bother to commit it to short term memory. We forget most of what we’re told by our screens within seconds.

We have to. If we tried to make sense of the deluge of data – digest it, organize it, store it – we’d burn out quickly on this stuff.  We’re not computers. We can’t efficiently deal with so much data, so we have to quickly (subconsciously) evaluate it for relevance and quickly forget about it.

I think 2012 might be a tipping-point. An inflection where the consumer (and companies) make a conscious choice to start turning some of their screens off. I think we’ll start seeing consumers make more conscious decisions about what updates they receive, what social networks they join, what games they play, and start leveraging filters to a greater extent to control the data flow.

But it won’t just be consumers. In a great example, Volkswagon is giving its employees a break from email after hours. They realize that their employees can’t be (shouldn’t be) plugged-in and working all the time. Employees don’t want that, either.

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Am I predicting a Luddite-like wholesale rejection of technology in our modern lives? No, not really. What I am saying is that processor, memory, bandwidth, and coverage on mobile devices has become so powerful and ubiquitous and cheap that constant data flow to consumers is economically and technically possible, but not all-together desirable … at least by consumers. Consumers are going to make choices. I’m betting they’re going to make choices that strengthen their privacy and reduce their need to process irrelevant information.

Producers will, of course, watch to update consumers all of the time.  I think we’ll start seeing signs of rejection from consumers in the next year, like, a digital burnout, where people try to arrive at a stronger balance between screens and real life.

R

How does it work?

It implies that the person positing the question really wants to understand how an input is transformed into an output. They see the pig go in and the sausage come out. Maybe it’s a survival instinct or a functional necessity … regardless, they’re curious. I dig curiosity.

Still, maybe 9 times out of 10, those asking the question really aren’t qualified to understand the intricacies of the answer. I could explain it but my words and ideas would be meaningless to them. Just a lot of jargon and psychobabble.

Honestly, I think it just makes them feel better if I can prove that I know how it works. Hey, if I could explain something then it gives me credibility. They can trust me, right?

It’s kind of like the plumbing or electrical in a house. How does it work? I think most people are concerned only when these things don’t work. Otherwise, it always works and it just … works in the background. You don’t think about it. You don’t ponder over it. You don’t study it. You don’t really care. It just works. And you pay somebody to make it work again. The details aren’t important.

• We go to a mechanic to make the car work. We don’t care why it’s not working, nor would most understand it. Just make it work.
• We go to a financial analyst to make our retirement planning work. We don’t understand the intricacies of the market. Just tell me what to do.
• We go to a dietitian for a weight loss strategy. We don’t want to get into the details of biology – just give me a plan.
• We go to a cell phone carrier for a mobile telephony solution. All the technical details are irrelevant. I want email, calendars, and contacts on the road, and on my iPad, and on my laptop. Just make it work.
• We go to a technician to fix our PC. Lots of geek-speak and jargon annoys. Just make it work, they’ll say.

This is the way of technology. Tech eventually obfuscates complexity in favor of function. So how it works is unimportant.

Instead, the more relevant question would be how could I use it, or, how will others use it? As questions, they’re more important. They’re the start of learning how to use technology to your competitive advantage and the end of fussing over its details.

R

Except, well, it’s not exactly a phone. It’s an appliance.

It’s something that looks and acts like a phone but it uses the Internet to make unlimited phone calls. Anywhere. At fixed rates.

How does it work? It plugs right into the Internet using the same wire your computer uses. Yeah. And that also means that you’re able to use the phone anywhere you’ve got an Internet connection. Cool! Great for telecommuters.

And it does all the things a regular phone does. You know, it calls, it rings, it transfers, it routes calls and forwards to cell phones, it handles voicemail and auto-attendants, it can do direct inward dials to extensions, it forwards voicemail through your email … it can even receive your faxes as PDF’s and route them to your email. Wow.

Well, maybe you didn’t know it, but Mickler & Associates, Inc. teamed up with Sipvine a year ago to offer this appliance to small businesses here in Vancouver, Washington. It’s a great fit for any small business who wants all of the features of a powerful phone system at a 1/10th of the cost.

Want to know more? Just comment, or contact me. It never hurts to ask me today about how I can save you money tomorrow.

R