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Written by Michael Nieves
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Wednesday, 26 September 2012 |
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Businesses of all sizes are taking their first steps into the cloud. From email to online backups (see our post on cloud backups), there are plenty of services available for companies to utilize. One cloud service, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is becoming more popular than ever. This allows major data centers around the world to host virtual servers that are set up for use on an hourly fee basis. Companies such as Amazon, for instance, have been successfully providing IaaS solutions with their EC2 service. A new player in the market, Google, is unveiling Google Compute Engine. I had the chance to look at and compare Google and Amazon's offerings.
Right from the start you notice that Amazon has far more operating systems available than Google. While with Amazon you can select from various versions of Windows and Linux, Google only allows you to choose Linux (Ubuntu and CentOS to be exact). This is a major advantage for Amazon. Many programs designed for business needs are made for Windows and not Linux. If Google wants to be a bigger competitor in the small to medium business market, expanding to a Windows environment is something they should offer.
Both companies offer several different locations where you can host your servers. Amazon, again, has more availability than Google, with data centers in Virginia, Oregon, California, Tokyo, South America, Ireland and Singapore. Google is limited to the United States, broken up into US East and US Central. If you have overseas offices this could be an issue.
Another major deciding factor for which service to use could be the price. With both services, the price is determined by the size of the computer you are building and how long you are keeping that server on. In IaaS terms, the predetermined sizes of the machines are called instances. Logically, the larger the size of the instance, the more expensive it is to host. Because of the flexibility of IaaS, you are by no means limited to these sizes. In the table below I have compared Amazon's and Google's large and small instances:
For a more in-depth look at Amazon's pricing check here and for Google check here.
Both have a lot of major features like firewalls for security and static IP addresses for web hosting or external access. From my standpoint, go with Amazon. They are affordable and easy to use. I have worked more often with Amazon and rarely have had an issue with their service. They have little to no downtime and have a website to keep you updated with the information they have (server status, downtime notices, etc). Though Google is not new to the cloud computing arena, they are to IaaS. This doesn't mean you shouldn't keep an eye out for them in the future. Google is very good at adapting and keeping themselves relevant. |
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Written by Lawrence Keller
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Thursday, 06 September 2012 |
Information is the lifeblood of many businesses, and for most organizations this information is kept digitally. Everyone has had that panic-inducing moment when a computer dies with an important presentation on it, or when you accidentally delete an important file. A virus could wipe out years of sentimental photos or have a critical server go down. Physical damage can be caused by a fire or flood. There are innumerable ways that data can be lost, destroyed, or corrupted. While preventive measures will reduce the chance of this happening, two ways of protecting data against potential loss is to create on-site (local) and/or off-site (remote) backups.
An important concept to understand while determining your backup needs is the 3-2-1 rule. This rule is a strong general practice to follow, and will help you in protecting your organization from data-loss. Here is the breakdown of the rule:
- 3 – Have three copies of any important data (Original location and two backups)
- 2 – Use two different types of media
- 1 – One copy should be off site
By following the 3-2-1 rule you can provide your organization with several methods to backup and restore your data. While this method may seem like overkill, the ability to restore your data from several locations can be crucial in times of need.
A simple example of an on-site backup would be copying your files from your PC or server to an external drive. This backup is a snapshot of the files you copied, which becomes less useful as time passes. External drives have become drastically cheaper in the last few years and through careful shopping a 1 terabyte (TB), or 1,000 gigabytes (GB) drive can be purchased in the $100-$150 range.
Onsite backups can also be achieved by having one centralized shared location for all data to be stored. Through the configuration of shared folder locations, data will be centralized for easier storage, backups, and management. Another benefit of having a shared centralized data source is providing a single location to backup, both onsite and offsite.
Another form of on-site backups are tape backups. Although a reliable choice for backups, most modern solutions stray away from this older backup media. The time and effort that is required to maintain and keep basic functions operational, combined with the generally higher cost of the backup has caused other backup solutions to rise to prominence, such as cloud based backups.
Depending on your organization's needs, there are several cloud backup solutions available. Two options that we recommend are Carbonite and JungleDisk. Carbonite is geared towards home and home office users. Carbonite is best suited when data is not centralized and several individual PCs need to be backed up. Carbonite has an annual fee ranging from $59/year to $149/year. This includes unlimited backup space, with each plan having more options than the last. JungleDisk has several tiered options, ranging from Personal to Workgroup and Server Editions. JungleDisk's pricing ranges from $2-$5 a month, with additional monthly charges based on total storage used. These charges are extremely low, averaging around $0.15 per GB/month. JungleDisk is a powerful option when backing up data that is in one centralized location.
No single backup solution is without some drawbacks. A combination of backup solutions allows you to utilize the benefits of each type of backup, using one pro to cover a con:
The local and remote backup solutions detailed here are only a small sampling of choices when it comes to backups. Backups are not trivial, and backup solutions are different for every business and individual.There is no better time than now to review your current backup solution, a critical piece to your disaster recovery plan. |
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Written by John Virgolino
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Saturday, 18 February 2012 |
Boomerang is an Internet browser add-on that does two things with Google Mail: It allows you to schedule when an email will be sent and it will take an email you received and put it back into your inbox at a scheduled time. Both features provide tremendous control over your email.
While delayed sending of email has long been available in Outlook, it is not a built-in option in Google Mail. According to a Google user forum, it may be in the works, but in the meantime, Boomerang fills that need. It's a nice browser add-on for Chrome and Firefox that adds a button to the GMail compose screen so you can schedule to send whenever you like. It's pretty straightforward, you pick a date and time and it queues it up for sending when you choose.
We do a lot of email deployments and migrations at Consul-vation and we have noticed that a lot of people use their inbox as a to-do list. A user may flag an email (Outlook) or star it (Google) to remind them that some action is required in the future. The problem with this approach is that you have to go back to these emails, and all to often with cluttered inboxes that doesn't happen. The results can be missed follow-ups, deadlines, or even revenue.
Boomerang helps out by allowing you to clean up the inbox by moving mail out of the way into the archive but marking them to "Boomerang" back into your inbox at a scheduled time, like a snooze button on your alarm clock. For instance, if you get an email from someone that requires you to follow-up in two days, click on the Boomerang button and mark it to return to your inbox in 2 days. At the precise time you specify, it will reappear in its original form in the inbox. In the mean time you can be confident that your reminder to follow-up will appear when you need it.
We've made a short video demonstrating the basic capabilities below (Best viewed in full screen mode). Boomerang is free for limited monthly use and costs up to $15 per month for a pro account. It's on the pricey side for a Pro user, but then again what is the value of the time and efficiency you gain and possible lost revenue you avoid?
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