Are you Ready to Throw the Notebook for a Netbook?

What’s the difference between a notebook and a Netbook?  Steve Jobs believes Netbooks are just cheap slow notebooks and everyone should but an iPad but perhaps they have a place in the modern business.

I would define a Netbook as a smaller laptop with longer battery life, an atom or similar low power consuming processor and typically do not have optical drives.

For the last 10 years companies have had to decide between larger expensive desktop replacement laptops or desktops or the expense of both for mobile employees.  Now for the price of a laptop you can often purchase a solid business class desktop and a Netbook.

Yes most Netbooks won’t break any processing records, but they will allow remote access to your office, work on word processing and other basic functions.  Netbooks also typically have longer battery life and with their smaller size they weigh less and are easy to just throw in a bag on the go.  One major objection or fear we get is the lack of CD/DVD drive.  First USB DVD drives are inexpensive if you can’t let go.  Secondly all Microsoft products on Open Licenses have to be downloaded anyway since Microsoft moved away from sending discs to it’s partners/  Even Windows comes with an easy program which can make you a USB boot disk that will install Windows 7 for you quickly and as easily as a DVD.  (Windows 7 USB Tool can be found here: http://store.microsoft.com/help/iso-tool ) Lastly any disc you have now can be quickly made into and mounted in a virtual DVD drive using a free ITP favorite MagicDisc found here: http://www.magiciso.com/tutorials/miso-magicdisc-history.htm

Looking for some reccomendations?  ITP staff favorite Netbooks are:

HP – HP Mini 210

Dell – Inspiron Mini 1018

Sony – Vaio X Series

Call us for a quote or help picking out a Netbook for your next trip for as low as $300.00.  Steve, they might be cheap but they work.

How Much Power Should the Internet Police Have – And Who Are the Internet Police?

Time to look at a sensitive, exponentially issue-inducing question: who should police the internet and how much policing should they, or anyone, be allowed to do? In this blog, we will be looking at the topic of domain name policing in particular.

We are constantly reminded of the anonymity and opportunity the internet affords its users. These freedoms are one of the founding principles of the internet: that it be an open canvas on which anything can be painted and anyone we want can view it. The internet was supposed to be a virtual land where the most typical, average person could stake a claim and make a small piece of it their own.

Like all newly-settled worlds, however, it cannot remain so forever. Various organizations have come about to monitor the internet and keep its users and their information safe. The Internet Corporation for the Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a non-profit in contract with the U.S. government, exists to manage internet addresses and oversee the addition of new domain suffixes. The most popular suffixes currently in use are .com, .net, and .org.

 A recent article on CNET.com once again brings to light the issue of domain name – and ultimately internet – governance. The United States government, among other governments both national and local, is looking to gain more power to allow or deny domain names. This has been a battle that has been raging in the internet background for as long as it has existed, and is a topic filled with shades of gray. For the past seven years, the domain suffix .xxx has been contested over by three camps: those who wish to use it, those who wish that it not be used at all, and those who wish not to be forced to use it.

Many adult content webmasters want to have the suffix .xxx be as useable as .com or .org, to give them their own space on the internet and make them easier to find. Currently .xxx is not a functioning domain. The United States government and many conservative organizations do not want the .xxx domain to exist, seeing it as comparable to allowing an adult video store on the same block as the white house.  On another end of the argument are those who see this new domain as a way to keep all of these adult content websites in one centralized location, so no one can accidentally stumble upon them or so they can be blocked more easily. Some adult content webmasters, and some webmasters who have sex education information on their websites, or others whose main purpose is not adult content but some exists on their site, do not want to be forced to join this new domain.

 Over 115 new domain name proposals are expected this year, and some raise controversies, such as the .gay domain. Whose responsibility – or right – is it to say whether or not the .gay or .freetibet domains can be used? If the former were used, it may upset millions of conservatives. If the latter were used, it may upset a government with rule over billions of people. Yet what about the people who want to use those names? What about their rights? They aren’t breaking any laws.

The debate over domain name allowance is explosive because it induces issues about freedom of speech and how much of a role governments should be able to play in the direction and access of the internet. Another example of governmental power over the internet is seen recently in Egypt, where the government shut down the internet in the entire country in an attempt to control its people. Is it right for a government to control something that belongs to no one, and yet belongs to everyone?

What Value Does Virtualization Provide?

It makes no difference whatsoever how amazing a technology is if it doesn’t provide a defined value for your business.  Below are the typical values businesses can expect to receive from deploying virtualization technology:

• Agility – Virtualized environments provide an incredible platform for adapting your company’s technology quickly in support of changing business goals and direction.
• Scalability – Adding new functionality to your company’s technology almost always presents numerous, critical, and complex concerns ranging from loss of productivity to significant capital expenditure. Virtualization simplifies this issue by eliminating hardware concerns from the equation.  In fact, a properly designed virtualization infrastructure will support relatively large changes in your company’s technology with very little complexity or out-of-pocket expense in comparison to a non-virtualized environment.
• Disaster Recovery – The ability to take an “image” of your server has been around for some time.  This ability is valuable from a disaster recovery standpoint because instead of rebuilding your server from scratch, you can simply reinstall the existing image of your server on a different piece of hardware which saves incredible amounts of time.  However, taking an existing image and installing it on a different hardware platform has always been at best difficult, and at the worst, nearly impossible. With a virtualized environment, however, this concern is eliminated because virtualization breaks the one-to-one ratio between your server hardware and software.

Note:  Management – Managing your company’s technology is a significant expense regardless of the size of your company or the market you’re in.  Yet, because technology is critical to productivity for almost every business these days, it is an expense that is absolutely necessary.  Virtualization doesn’t necessarily add to the management time required, and in certain circumstances, it can help reduce management time by removing the complexity of managing different hardware platforms.  However, it can also add some processes to your existing management routine, and if you don’t have professional, in-house IT support, you may need to leverage the services of your existing IT consultant a little more.

How Does Virtualization Work?

From a very high level virtualization architecture  is pretty straight forward.  You take one very powerful server and you install virtualization software on it.  Once you have the virtualization “layer” installed, you then install any desired server systems on top of it.  This effectively creates a platform for a one-to-many hardware-to-software relationship.  Of course, all the hardware and software specifications need to be taken into account cumulatively to properly design and deploy a virtualized environment.

What is Virtualization

The simplest way to explain virtualization may be:  the ability to run multiple operating systems on a single piece of hardware.  Of course, this is my personal definition and is specific to the context of how SMB’s typically use virtualization.  For a more formal definition, Wikipedia has a pretty good one.  Anyhow, in practice, this means that if your business employs 3 physical servers running Windows Server operating systems you could purchase one server and run all three instances of your Windows Server operating systems on that single piece of hardware. 

At first glance it may not seem that revolutionary, but virtualization is changing the way technology is used across all market segments. Really.

Virtualization 101 – Is it a Good Solution for SMB’s?

Virtualization as a technology has been around for quite some time, but it has only become prevalent within the SMB community over the past few years.  There are many reasons for this including cost, market viability, network infrastructure requirements, and more, but those barriers have been mostly removed over the past few years, making virtualization one of the most interesting and potentially valuable technologies for business today.  Yet, as we enter 2011, many businesses still don’t understand the values virtualization can provide them, nor do many businesses understand how to analyze whether virtualization is a good fit for them.  Well, read on and find out the practical aspects of utilizing virtualization technology for your business.