LANcom Technology Blog

HP have started shipping notebooks with Vodafone Mobile 3G built in. By the end of 2007 they expect this capability to be in all their commercial use notebooks.

You will be able to get up to 3Mb/s in all the major metropolitan areas now. With this technology (and also with the coming Wimax technology) you will be able to have the same services you get now at your desk sitting anywhere in a major city with your notebook.

Our remote worker report is at the printers and will be here on Tuesday.

It is a 13 page report written in non-technical language for the user who wants to work remotely and the manager who wants to enable his workers to access their information remotely.

The report runs through the technologies available, what they may be used for and the relevant costs.

It is available free in printed form from LANcom by emailing owenr@lancom.co.nz

We will post it in our resources section of our website soon as a PDF download.

We launched our new website today here at www.lancom.co.nz

It is running on a Content Management System (CMS). What this allows us to do is to get information onto the web site much faster than before so that we can keep you far better informed.

As well as a much cleaner look there is also a new downloads section for you where we have free resources available to you. These include reports on Remote working, Internet security and a market guide for selecting IT companies.

This blog will automatically feed to our web homepage if you want to keep track of it there.

770 = Seven to Seventy computers.

The LANcom 770 IT management plan is purpose designed to support businesses with between seven and seventy computers.

If you have less than seven computers you are unlikely to have a server and are likely (and often wisely) to be concerned about limiting IT expenditure. We are providing services you don’t need.

The seventy computer limit is more approximate than the seven minimum. Somewhere after 70 computers you will want to start defining your own IT standards. With a LANcom 770 IT management plan, we build and run the standard pieces, like email servers, in a very standardised way to make supporting them very cost effective. When you have 300 computers and IT staff of your own there is a return in customising the standard pieces like email to your own businesses. Our belief is that if you are a typical 7-70 customers you should only customise the pieces where small changes will make a great deal of difference to your business. Everything else should be standardised.

There are occasional exceptions to the metrics (customers smaller than seven and customers much larger than seventy computers) but in the main this is a good description of the size of customer best suited to the 770 plan.

The basic warranties that hardware vendors provide in 2006 are inadequate for critical servers.

The standard HP warranty is a next business day response. Actual resolution may take many days depending on the nature of the problem and parts supply. HP use statistical methods to try and keep enough parts in the country so that basic warranties are serviced within days but there is no guarantee. If you are unlucky it could be weeks.

We strongly recommend that business critical servers have their warranties upgraded to the 6 hour call to repair service. HP will keep a complete set of spare parts for your server at hand. These parts are pooled between your server and two other servers. The only way that a part will be unavailable is if you are unlucky enough to have the same failure at the same time as one of your pooled servers - this is incredibly unlikely.

The warranty can be activated 24 hours a day and seven days a week. It is designed to have resolution of hardware failures within 6 hours of the original call for service.

At around $2500 to upgrade the standard warranty for three years I think it is great value.

We have some generic policies on Internet use and email use.

Many companies intend on writing one or both but, few actually do.

Send me an email (warwicke@lancom.co.nz) if you would like a copy.

One of problems in having your own internal IT guy is that there is no peer review. The IT person is isolated and works without restraint or review. In contrast the engineering team assigned to you on your LANcom 770 plan works to continually approved methodologies and techniques and the work that they do is under consistent peer review.

When you employ your own IT guy there are no guidelines and no review.

The biggest meltdowns we come across –system failures where there is no full recovery and partial recovery is expensive and long winded - are always where the lone IT guy has gone feral. More often than not the system failure was self inflicted by a massively overconfident operator who had no body to rein him in.