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Hosting - Co-Lo V's Fully Managed
Tue, 16/02/2010 - 17:13 — icoAt ICO we are passionate about our support and customer service, not just from our highly knowledge technical team, but throughout the business, from sales and marketing to operations.
Our prime goal is to always add value for new prospective clients (and our existing clients), from the perspective of offering not only a sound technical solution, but also a cost effective solution.
We recently received an enquiry from a new client who was running two, three year old servers in a Melbourne based data center, under a Co-Location arrangement.
The client, who was based in Sydney, initially asked if ICO could provide a Co-Location arrangement for these servers in our Sydney data center, as the arrangement in Melbourne was becoming very problematic from an ongoing administration and support perspective.
Whilst ICO does not generally offer Co-Location services, during the course of the initial discussion we became aware this client faced some very significant problems in managing their IT environment, namely:-
- The existing servers were quite old and the customer was faced with a looming decision to incur additional high cost capital expenditure to replace them
- They had to carry the cost for 2 servers because the business model was critical and therefore they needed to run a replicated “hot standby” server to cover the potential of a production server failure
- They were faced with the challenge of finding a competent organisation who could provide backup support/maintenance for the hardware and software
- Apart from their own specialist supply chain management application, they used a Plesk control panel to manage multiple web sites and a Mail Enable server for email. Day to day management and administration of both Plesk and Mail Enable was a major problem for them as they had no one on staff capable of handling this role. Subsequently, they had suffered periods of downtime in the past due to a lack of local technical knowledge on these products.
Once the scale of the clients challenges became clear, our account manager was able to recommend an approach that resolved all the issues in a very cost effective manner. For less than $800/mth, we were able to offer this client (and they accepted) a fully managed hosting package covering:
- A fully managed server running on our VMWare ESX Infrastructure,
- live support engineer 24 x 7 support,
- full dynamic failover capability (dispensing with the client’s need to run 2 dedicated servers),
- full daily managed backup,
- full Anti Virus management and
- complete management of all Operating System software.
- An ICO fully managed service to look after the administration and management of both Plesk and Mail Enable.
I know there are a lot of blogs about the twitter phenomenon and I don't intend to turn our blog into a twitter blog. However, as early adopters of technology I thought it was worthwhile to talk about our twitter experience.
It seems that more and more individuals and organisations are using twitter. For example, the new USA President, President Obama has used twitter as part of his campaign and continues to use it to get messages out to thousands of people. And closer to home, Mosman Council, a local sydney council, has become quite active recently and even encourages local residents to submit photos and get involved in the 'Community Conversation'. Reports have even been written about twitter, O'Reilly Media produced 'Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution: Communication, Connections and Immediacy - 140 Characters at a Time'.
Our own experience of twitter has been positive. Our internal emails have significantly reduced and internal communication has increased, especially with our team members who work offsite.
Twitter has been great for improving communication, even if the comments posted are not directly about work, it's good to know what other people are doing. It's also a lot quicker than sending an email and is completely acceptable to post a short, sharp message. No one is obliged to reply.
We use it for feedback on an idea, and will use it to prompt brain storming sessions. It has definitely added a 'buzz' to the team.
Of course there are downsides of applications traditionally known as 'social networking'. People can get immersed in them and spend hours updating their status and photos. Fortunately we haven't had this problem with twitter as we have guidelines for use which encourage updating but also give a daily time limit. Also, when limited to 140 characters there is less likelihood of excessive time being spent writing updates. There's only so much you can say in 140 characters!
We have also incorporated our twitter IDs into our email signatures and they will also appear in the contact details of our new business cards.
Feel free to comment on this blog. What do you think about twitter? Is it a waste of your time or do your colleagues, family and friends appreciate the quick updates?
The Browser as an Operating System
Tue, 23/12/2008 - 03:10 — icoI’ve been thinking lately about Google Chrome and the Browser as an operating system. If we think of websites as applications (eg. Internet Banking, Salesforce.com, News) and an operating system as a tool for finding and launching applications, then really the challenge for the next generation operating system is to unify the experience between local and remote applications.
For instance, most operating systems have a feature that makes the most recently used applications easily accessible. Really this should apply to web applications too. So, ideally your operating system should realise which Internet Banking site you use and integrate that into your commonly used applications. Will we get to the point where 3rd party developers decide that they can do a better job of presenting an integrated experience than the Operating System Manufacturer? Is this what Google Chrome will evolve into?
Of course it brings up many security issues that need to be resolved with users not knowing whether applications are being launched remotely or locally. We all remember how troublesome it was when Microsoft integrated their browser into the operating system. But, the more I think about it, the more I think they had the right idea.
