Virtualization is a hot topic in today’s IT world, and literally means using a virtual rather than actual version of something to increase efficiency, such as a storage device, server or network resources. It is not a new concept despite all the current “hype”, and partitioning your hard drive on your laptop follows the same process.   It is just an old idea that is now being used in a new way to create some really dramatic changes.

Three kinds of virtualization are now being deployed in the data center – storage virtualization, network virtualization, and server virtualization.

In storage virtualization, physical storage devices are pooled from many network storage devices to give the appearance of a single device, managed from a central source. Storage area networks or SANs use this technology extensively.

Data installation centers of the past were filled with racks and racks of power hungry servers, taking up valuable space and generating heat.  Today’s data centers use server virtualization as a way of consolidating many “virtual” servers (referred to as virtual machines) into one piece of equipment.   Therefore, modern data centers have lowered power requirements, lowered space requirements and the ability to have needed redundancy without additional Capex.

Virtual servers are created via the use of special software that effectively partitions a system into virtual areas that act as unique,stand-alone devices.  Each virtual machine is fully capable of running its own OS (operating system), making virtual machines a great way to test new OS’s or OS additions.

Last but not least, today’s data centers are using network virtualization as well to reduce costs and increase efficiencies.  The simplest form of network virtualization is the use of VLANs – pioneered by Cisco Systems.   In a VLAN architecture, a systems administrator can configure systems that are attached to the same network as different virtual networks.   He or she can also combine separate local networks into a VLAN that can span an entire large corporate network.  VLAN architectures are sometimes referred to as “external network virtualization”.  Some newer architectures are now available featuring “internal network virtualization”.   This usually is configured via containers or pseudo interfaces which creates what some vendors refer to as a “network-in-a-box”.

The end result of the tremendous upsurge in these three forms of virtualization technology is a dramatically streamlined data center – capable of meeting the challenges poised by cloud computing and our ever-growing needs for storage and information access.

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The most widely adopted approach for IT service management on the planet is known as ITIL – or Information Technology Information Library.  It describes a set of best practices and concepts for a state-of-the-art network today.

Originally created by the CCTA under the auspices of the British government, ITIL defines a supplier independent methodology including a set of operational management procedures that have been tried and tested over a 20 year period.

ITIL forms the basis of many supplier service offerings, and three levels of certification exists for those proficient in ITIL; Foundation, Practitioners, and Managers.

A full description of ITIL would span many pages as the current release contains 30 volumes – but there are a few central concepts that are key.  One is the concept of Incident Management, where an incident is defined as any event that is not part of the standard operation of the service which could cause either an interruption of the service or a reduction in the quality of the service.  Incident management focuses on restoration of normal service as quickly as possible with as little impact as possible.

Another central concept is known as Problem Management, which simply means finding the root cause of incidents so their impact is minimized.  Problem Management is more proactive than Incident Management, and focuses on trend analysis, targeting support action, and providing critical information to the organization in the resolution of incidents.

Yet another key concept is that of Change Management, which focuses on making sure that standardized processes and procedures are used when changes are made to the network and services offered.  When proper Change Management is implemented,  minimal disruption of services and efficient utilization of resources result after any changes are made.

When choosing a service package for your network,  the choice of one based on ITIL will ensure that you get a standardized approach based on many years of knowledge and experience, as well as a process that is repeatable.    Choosing a certified practitioner or making sure that certified personnel are available from your service provider is a wise choice for your network.

If you are setting up a new network, it makes sense to review the basic ITIL literature to ensure that proper procedures are set up for its management.

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Innovation marches on, and wire and cable technology is yet another area where the “latest and greatest” can be found on Google via a simple search.  The newest type of Ethernet cable is cat 7, or category 7 cabling.

Cat 7 cable was designed to handle 10 Gigabit Ethernet traffic over 100 m of copper cabling.  As such, it has much stricter standards for crosstalk and systems noise that cat 5e or cat 6.   It contains four twisted wire copper pairs just like cat 5e and cat 6 cabling, but each pair is individually shielded to achieve these standards.

It is important to note that no cat 7 cable types are officially “approved” at this time, so if having the blessing of a standards body is important to you or your business, it is best to stick with “tried and true” cat 5e cabling unless you have very large files you need to transfer very quickly.

Also, cat 7 cabling is designed for 10G traffic which most small and medium businesses don’t necessary need now.  This doesn’t mean that the evolution of the Internet won’t change this in the future, but the good news is that cat 7 is compatible with cat 5e and cat 6.  All three types of cabling can coexist in the same network, which means you can upgrade the sections of your network that require it in the future while leaving your older cat 5e and cat 6 cable in place.

But if you, like Robert Bosch corporation, want your network to still be current 18 years in the future – then cat 7 cabling may be worth it for you.   Robert Bosch also opted for TERA connectors instead of RJ-45 to extend the overall capabilities and frequency range of this “state-of-the-art” infrastructure.

Whatever your cabling or infrastructure needs, network cabling installers are there to help!  The professionals will take an in-depth look at your business model and make well-considered recommendations for your current and future needs.   Call professional network cabling installers today to start moving your network in the right direction!

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In the dark ages, the Internet was nothing more than a toy or a hobby for those who liked to live on the “cutting-edge” of technology.  Slowly, it morphed into an individual tool for employees to use when doing extensive research on a particular topic, then it became a tool for those looking for art or photographs.  The first wave of Internet business tools provided new ways for companies to promote, position, and advertise their goods and services.

Innovations followed swiftly – and the Internet morphed from a one-to-one tool to a one-to-many tool, and ultimately to a many-to-many tool with the advent of social networks such as Linked-in and Facebook.

What’s next?  The latest buzz is all about the upcoming Internet migration from being a tool that is used mostly by people, to one that extends its reach to objects.   Can’t visualize your company’s inventory interacting with the Internet?  Read on…

RFID tagging – where small radio frequency transmitters are placed on containers of materials, piece parts, etc will drive one of the first waves of “things” interacting with the Internet.   Small radio waves will be sent from every container, box, or even individual component that will correlate with serial numbers, date codes, or any other piece of data you want to track.  Boxes in a storage facility can be tracked to exact location with the combination of RFID tracking and GPS technology.  Delivery vehicles can be tracked, and all individual shipping containers per delivery vehicle can also be tracked.   And this technology extends far beyond simple package and inventory tracking!  It can be used to track retail products purchased by individuals (imagine how useful it would be to have your cereal box announce that it is no longer fresh once past its use date), auto parts installed in your car, medical equipment used, and even articles of clothing.

Another wave of this movement will happen as the “Smart Grid” replaces the antiquated world power delivery systems.   This will use the Internet as a communications platform between your home and power distribution stations – saving you money, saving power, and allowing selective shut down of some less critical appliances and outlets in the advent of a brown-out or overload.  No more blown transformers or complete black-outs!

Home Appliances can become “smart” as things increasingly begin to interact with the Internet.   Your refrigerator can IM you to let you know you are about to run out of eggs, or that the milk has gone bad (based on days of storage).   You can tap a few keys on your computer before leaving work, and come home to a warm hot tub and soft music to unwind from your day.

Your business – small or large – as well as your home needs to be equipped to take advantage of these new trends.  This means having a solid networking backbone based on either a cat 5e or cat6 cable scheme, and a well-designed data storage and delivery system.   It also may mean consulting with professionals, like structured cabling installers, in order to plan for both current, and future needs for your “smart” home and business.

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Is your network ready for the future?  You may think you have all the infrastructure you need for now, but in our fast paced world, you either keep up or get left behind. And why is being left behind such a bad thing?

Because innovation is creating productivity enhancements at lightning speed.  Before you can say “TCP/IP” , the business world will have evolved into a environment where workers are highly productive from anywhere – not just their offices.   And offices offer productivity enhancing innovations like telepresence (which means no more down time in airports, train stations, etc), collaboration, company-wide internal social networks, and easily searchable databases containing knowledge applicable to every facet of an employee’s job.

What will the future hold?  The sky is the limit.   Already being discussed are innovations like holographic telepresence – where not only do you have a conference with someone remote, you have the total illusion that they are in the same room with you.   The need for “face time” is met in a sales situation without the incredible expenses and downtime associated with travel.

Database sizes will increase, and employees will be able to search from any kind of input – an idea, a song, a graphic, or a topic.   Much of this knowledge will reside in “the cloud” (a new term or “buzzword” for applications or information resident on servers located offsite), meaning the demand for robust, secure data centers will increase rapidly.  Larger companies will build their own data centers, but small and medium sized data centers will rely on outsourced data centers to have the security and reliability they need to run their businesses efficiently.  It goes without saying that the small and medium businesses will have to have both a high speed WAN connection AND a rock solid internal infrastructure to support remote large file downloads from such data centers.

IM clients where employee’s can simply transfer files back and forth are already a reality. Who wants to wait for long email downloads?  Besides, most email servers have a size limit installed, to prevent the transmission of harmful files.   Instant file transfer cuts down on printing and printing costs, but it takes bandwidth and a solid infrastructure.

“Future-proofing” your network so you are poised to take advantage of innovation as it happens will allow you to reap the benefits of enhanced productivity and lowered costs.  This means having a solid network infrastructure based on at least a cat 5e or cat 6 cable architecture.

If you don’t want to be left out in the cold, call the right structured wiring installers for a comprehensive network assessment and cost effective quotation.  The right professionals will assess your unique needs, and make sure that a solution is planned, designed, and delivered that will help you take advantage of the coming changes.

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Joe Small Business Owner rushes out to buy the latest and greatest servers, printers, and wireless access points for his company – spending lots of capital in the process.  Yet when it comes to his inside wiring, he just runs another used cat 5 wire he got from eBay or Craig’s List across the floor or over a cabinet and thinks he is saving money. What’s wrong with this picture?

For starters, “rat’s nest wiring” can create many problems that get blamed on the shiny new equipment – such as poor performance and interference.   Running wires too close to fluorescent lighting can also cause interference that shows up as slow data or voice connections.   And who knows what is actually INSIDE those walls!

Wires with frayed shielding in the walls can cause increased vulnerability to interference too, and this can be an elusive problem that usually gets blamed on equipment misconfiguration.    Damaged media or wiring inside the walls can lead to intermittent dropped connections, which is very annoying when using VoIP (voice-over-IP) telephone systems as key parts of calls may be dropped.

Poor termination of Ethernet cabling or fiber optic cabling can lead to a whole host of problems that can plague your business’s mission critical activities in many ways.  And using old wiring such as cat 3 while trying to handle streaming media is another mistake made by many – it is older media and directly analogous to trying to fit an entire pitcher of lemonade into a thimble.

What’s a business owner to do?  Call experienced network cabling installers to come and do a comprehensive evaluation of not only the cabling you can see, but also what you can’t see.  Professional installers use the latest wire integrity evaluation equipment on the market to test for compromised shielding, improper termination, or damaged media that may be wreaking havoc on your business communications.  And they will only recommend that wiring be upgraded if it really needs to be – no need to worry about upgraded wiring being recommended just because someone wants a trip to Tahiti.

Business communications are critical to your very growth – and survival in this economic climate.  Running top notch “state-of-the-art” IT equipment over faulty wiring is like driving a Porsche in off road conditions; you just wouldn’t do it. Professional installers will identify any wiring issues, and also any potential interference issues and either reroute wiring or use a media type that is not susceptible to interference.

No matter what the professionals find, they will keep your needs and your budget in mind at all times throughout the process.   No nasty surprises at the end of the job, and no more compromised communications.  Why wait, call professional network cabling installers today!

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There has never been a more exciting time to be involved with IT or technology itself – as innovation is everywhere.  Many new changes are disruptive in nature, and promise to change the way we work, play and live in positive ways. A few of these breakthroughs include Telepresence, and 4G wireless technologies such as LTE and WiMax.

Why is Telepresence disruptive?  It promises to change the way we conduct business by taking all the ills brought by videoconferencing and addressing them, so that the illusion of a face-to-face meeting is preserved real time.   In turn, the need for travel is minimized  which saves millions of dollars for many corporations while reducing the overall carbon footprint – allowing businesses to position themselves as “green” in the marketplace.

Telepresence adoption rates are growing rapidly as new applications for the technology are discovered, such as high end virtual fitting rooms and showrooms in the retail world and virtual medical consulting for shut-in patients.

4G wireless technology is disruptive as it provides a true merging of the cellular and wireless data worlds – allowing full data capabilities to be enjoyed over smart phones and enabling a whole host of mobile devices that are smaller than a laptop yet bigger than a mobile phone. This allows us to remain connected no matter where we are, yet untethered.

New 4G technologies promise to address the dropped calls we all experience on existing cell networks as well, and will allow increased subscriber densities too.   Most importantly, with 4G technology, we will actually be able to download data files using our mobile phones without it seeming to take hours.  Critical files can be downloaded on our smart phones anywhere, and later transferred to netbooks or laptops for modifications if needed. Web browsing will be much faster, and real time video gaming over mobile phones will be enabled for the first time.

These trends and many others will continue to shape our world in the foreseeable future.   Watch for holographic telepresence systems and even faster mobile networks to arrive within the next 5 to 10 years.

Keep in mind that when in need of professional data installation services or structured wiring, it is absolutely essential that you hire experienced network cabling installers, for all of your IT infrastructure needs.

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The standardly used wiring for both home and company networks is twisted pair – twisting the wires cancels out electromagnetic interference effects and improves SNR or signal-to-noise ratio.  Because cat 5, cat5e and cat6 wiring are all twisted pair wiring types, there are special handling requirements that apply.

First of all, try not to twist the cable as you install it.  This can cause fragile internal wiring to split or break, and can degrade the insulation.  When running twisted pair cabling, try to use gentle curves rather than sharp angles which can degrade performance.  It also makes sense when using UTP (unshielded twisted pair) cabling to install wires a safe distance away from any other wiring, and especially from fluorescent lighting.

To maximize performance and minimize latency, use as short of a cable run as you possibly can get away with using.  In any event, never use more than 100 meters of cabling.   Pulling two wires per “drop” (room, or area needing a connection) provides redundancy, which means you have a spare should one of the wires become degraded.   Using two boxes of wiring makes this easier to do.  Position your patch panel or hub in a central location such that each wire run is minimized.

If you nick a cable – don’t just let it go and think it will be OK. It won’t be over time.  Degradation in performance is easy to achieve at Fast Ethernet or Gigabit Ethernet speeds.  Discard or recycle this cable and pull a new one, to be safe.  If you start with the longest runs first, if you nick a long wire, you can cut some of it off and still have enough for a shorter run.

It goes without saying that labeling each wire as soon as you pull it makes it easier to remember where it goes!  Use colored tape, and mark the same colors on the RJ45 sockets you place the wire terminations into.   Try to minimize the untwisting you do at the ends and connections when terminating the wires.   Test the wiring with a high quality tester – lower quality testers do not detect “split pairs” or stress test wiring at high bit rates.

Pulling low voltage twisted pair cabling does take time and practice – if the infrastructure you are considering pulling is mission critical, it makes sense to leave it to professionals.   Call experienced network cabling installers a cost-effective, thorough and professional job that you can count on for future as well as current infrastructure needs.

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Cloud computing and storage is a rapidly growing trend in the IT world – and its advantages are many.  Storing company data in the cloud means the data is safe in the event of a local disaster or fire, eliminates the needs for local power-hungry and maintenance intensive servers, and is in keeping with the current trends towards outsourcing.

Yet every business needs to consider whether using the cloud is right for their unique needs – as cloud computing is not going to be cost-effective for everyone at this stage.

First of all, any business using cloud based information storage for mission critical material needs to make sure that the data is backed up in multiple places.  If a bomb hits Denver, Colorado and that is where your data is stored, this doesn’t pose a problem if you have redundant storage in a data center in New York, for example.

Secondly, if instant retrieval of data is required – having a solid WAN connection using a reputable provider with a good SLA (service level agreement) is essential.  Otherwise, information retrieval could be slow and spotty.

If security is a concern, there are highly secure facilities available for storage.  However, many security conscious companies prefer to have their data directly under their thumb – stored locally with tight controls such as biometric requirements to allow access.

If your company is large with high data storage requirements, creating a data center tailored to your unique needs and managed by direct employees simply makes sense.  This can then be viewed as a “private cloud” – accessible to only those in your enterprise. But if your company is small, purchasing, maintaining and upgrading servers may be a bigger headache than moving to the cloud.

One of the greatest benefits of the cloud is the use and storage of applications to be used across your entire business.  This frees your employees and/or internal IT staff from the endless cycle of bug fixes and upgrades that used to be required for PC resident applications, and allows them to do more productive, revenue producing work.

Having each entire hard drive or computing capability in the cloud also frees individual users from having to run virus checkers, antispyware checkers and other utilities that can cost them productive work time or severely compromise their systems if not performed in a timely manner.

Overall, the cloud represents a paradigm shift from yesterday’s thinking that all equipment had to be resident at the customer’s site.   It may make many think that the importance of having a solid company IT backbone and infrastructure is lessened, but in fact, the opposite is true.  In order to use remotely stored data and applications most efficiently, the basics for a great IT infrastructure have to be in place.  If you need to upgrade your internal wiring, routers, or local IT architecture – call structured wiring installers to help you create a winning strategy for your current and future needs.

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For the last several years, technical magazines and blogs have heralded the arrival of the “smart home” as a goal for those of us who pride ourselves on being on the cutting edge.   Is the “smart home” really available for the common household to attain? What is it, really?

For starters, a smart home doesn’t have to resemble a Sci Fi flick or the home of the cartoon characters “The Jetsons” from the 60s.  With properly installed infrastructure, a “smart” home can look as “dumb” as a log cabin – until you uncover its secrets.

Today’s smart home IS a reality, and has a combination of both wired and wireless networking components – wireless access points to connect gaming stations, security cameras and laptops to the web, and wired connections for mission critical components such as computers that use streaming video, smart TV boxes or gaming platforms such as the PS3 that connect to Netflix, and VoIP telephones or ATA (analog telephone adapters).

Given the demands placed on the network infrastructure, a minimum of 6MB of Internet bandwidth is essential.  Luckily, this is not difficult in today’s environment. Many major cities actually offer up to 12MB to residential customers at a reasonable price.

Smart homes can combine a wide variety of features and benefits, which can include integrated TV-telephone and internet which allows viewing of Caller ID on the TV or retrieval of messages or recorded TV shows from the Internet, control of appliances or lights over a web-based control system, streaming “on-demand”  movies over the Internet straight to your TV, automated reporting of security issues over the Internet to local authorities or fire departments, and automated power usage reporting to help control costs.   Some smart homes, although few at this stage, also have robots programmed into the infrastructure to help with household chores such as sweeping, mowing the lawn, and even getting things from the fridge!  The company that makes the Roomba vacuum offers an open source kit for designing such a customized robot as part of your personalized smart home.

The wired part of a smart home’s infrastructure should be sound, scalable to support future upgrades, and invisible to guests or animals that could trip over loose wiring.   It is best to use the latest technology wire such as cat 6 or cat6e also, as future requirements may make cat 5 cable obsolete.  Doing it yourself may be fun, but in the long run, it is best to hire a professional team that is familiar with the latest low voltage code standards to handle these tasks.  Make sure you hire network cabling installers that will wire your smart home to YOUR needs.

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