What IT companies will not (can not) tell you. The 100% business continuity solution.

Technology - Without it, the business world would collapse. Unfortunately, with technology it can also be expensive and at times, unreliable. Our purpose is to explain to you a few ways some clients have eliminated a main expensive component in their business – Downtime, planned or unplanned. A seemingly unsolvable and major setback for business and Administrators alike that has indeed been the cause for a business to;

1. File bankruptcy within six months of a crash

2. Loss of clients/patients

3. Loss of thousands if not millions of dollars annually

4. Loss of jobs and inadvertently causing an organization to downsize

5. loss of data and the enormous cost to repair that data – if that is possible

6. and most importantly, the enormous stress on the company and the techs who work so hard to attempt to keep your systems online.

What are the solutions? Well today’s standards might ask you to buy an overpriced cluster solution that still only gives 99.9% up-time. That still is almost nine hours of down time yearly. On researching the reliability of a cluster, we talked to many clients using cluster solutions and one thing they honestly admit that they have no idea the system will even kick in if there is a situation that calls for it. We are not including the scripting, management, hardware cost, multiple Operating Systems (OS) and applications, amongst other factors. There are many “solutions” which is a joke when you are the one responsible for your systems staying up.

“Well that is all that is available right? I mean, we can’t afford to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars like the big companies for a state of the art systems.” The truth is even big corporations are loosing incredible amount of money, data security and their best technicians are still at a loss trying to engineer a workable solution. Sure you can use Unix or Solaris but that is a software solution and that still does not handle the hardware side of the problem. a

This is where I come in. I feel for business and especially the techs. These guys are the heartbeat of companies and they still get very little respect and even less pay for their brilliant resolve. However, you would be shocked at companies that are sold into a solution and terrified of change. Personally I do not lose any sleep if a company doesn’t use a new technology or at least research what is out there– their competitors will. They can reduce their operating cost, increase their production rate and in many cases both. In many situations this percentage is over 50%!

I am sure you know this, but technology utilized properly should make your company much more capital in return. After all, is the purpose of investing in any technology also the same reason why you invest in the first place, to make money? To the degree and quality one outflows his time, money etc. will be proportionate to what he inflows. While this universal basic philosophy of life holds true, competence, ingenuity and the ability hold your ground and succeed separates those who succeed and become powerful and those who do not. With this said, in intelligent hands, technology can do amazing things but in the wrong hand’s it can destroy a business and even lives. However, we all agree it takes money to make money but let me show you some ways to help you with all of that. Here are some ways to profit using technology.

Let us take a server. Although IT companies will never admit it, they count on two things to happen.

Downtime

Servers go down and this is very common. We all agree downtime (the time the server is down or inoperable or inaccessible) does indeed cause a business lose money, lose clients and can even inadvertently cost lives, we have all agreed on that. We also we have agreed that repairing any data loss and the other problems associated with downtime, to financial loss and bad PR from losing clients (and lost clients) because you could not service them when they needed it is very, very bad.

Well I have some great news for you!

There are a couple of very workable solutions for mission critical servers that we found about that is very affordable.

1. The true definition of Fault Tolerant servers.

While there are many servers that claim to be fault tolerant, I only found one that is truly a 100% FT server! We are not talking about a mirrored disk or a HD RAID but the whole box. We found a server that does not have one single point of failure! Imagine a whole box that is Fault Tolerant! We also have a written guarantee of 99.999% up-time!

2. You