First, let me say that I have a webinar to discuss these concepts in more detail on 9/20/11.  It will be recorded and available on our website: www.advance2000.com if you can not attend live.

Here's the link to register: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/780300062

What if you moved your entire IT infrastructure and people to one location?  Now imagine what would happen if many firms moved their IT to the same location.  What would that look like?  How could this sharing drive economies of scale and commodity pricing?

In this webinar, we'll look at all aspects of your IT and how it will be changing: datacenter, WAN, Internet, Storage, Servers, Applications, Databases, Desktops, PBX, Security, IT Staffing, and Business to Business ecommerce.

Your IT is no longer strategic--rather how your business USES IT that makes it strategic and differentiates you.

Join us for this thought-provoking webinar led by Chris France, President Advance2000 NC

The Collapse of the IT Shop as we know it.

 

1. Datacenter – all businesses no matter how small, should have all their IT running in a secure, redundant power, well cooled facility.  A2K
2. Hub-Spoke WAN – PRIVATE, Cheap, high speed fiber optic metro Ethernet from offices to data center. VLAN for virtual enterprise
3. Internet – 100mb+ shared internet from datacenter
4. SIP – 100mb+ shared phone circuit from datacenter
5. Alcatel-Lucent enterprise PBX in datacenter, only IP handsets in offices, login over WAN.
6. Servers – Virtualized, shared, private server infrastructure in datacenter
7. Storage – virtualized, shared, private high-end SAN storage infrastructure in datacenter
8. Mission Critical and non-Mission critical Applications – virtualized, shared, private applications in datacenter: email, sharepoint, CRM, Financials, Revit, Perfect Practice, etc.
9. Workstations – virtualized, private in datacenter
10. End-user computing devices: laptops, desktops, notebooks, dumb terminals
11. Office Printers/copiers
12. 24x7 service desk, minimal office dispatching.  Local spares/redundancy.

Mobility and Highly Productive People.  People and Businesses demand it.  And with the Advance2000 private cloud you can enjoy it.  Working on a laptop is great as long as you don't have to collaborate with anyone else.  But all great endeavors are accomplished with a team of highly trained professionals.  Think back to the days when you had one office and all your applications and data were readily accessible.  Everything worked great as long as you were physically sitting in that office.  Now imagine if you could work just as fast and efficiently no matter where you are located: HQ, remote office, home, hotel, Starbucks, and even the beach.  If you are striving for a Tim Ferriss 4-hr work week, this is the beginning of your road to freedom.

Here is a short video showing how I (Chris France) work in the cloud.

 

 

Is it possible to run an entire office in a private cloud?  Absolutely!  And if you are in Charlotte, NC you can make an appointment to come see it live.  I work every day in the cloud and it is an exceptional experience.  And it keeps getting better.

Here’s what’s going on:

• We are mobile.  Working at home, our clients’ office, hotel, Starbuck’s and even our office is now possible.
• I have a laptop for mobility and a 24 in PCoIP terminal when in my office.
• Our office is in the Regus Ayrsley Facility and I have no local servers, PBX’s, or IT staff but I am operating like I do.
• “In the Cloud”, I actually have all the enterprise IT such as an Alcatel-Lucent PBX, Virtual Desktops, Virtual Servers, backups, Data SAN, High-speed Internet, and of course a generator.
• If I lose power out at Ayrsley, no problem.  I go home, Starbucks or to a client’s office to work.
• On my phone, I have a corporate directory and I can dial any employee within the company no matter what office location they are in.
• And this costs MUCH less than building it yourself.
• Contact me: cfrance@advance2000.com OR
  
• If you’d like to hear more, I’ll be giving a seminar in Charlotte on May 11.  Click here to register: Private Cloud Seminar           

 

What Apple did to music, Amazon did to books.  I read a lot, I mean a lot between personal, enjoyment, business, and technology there’s a bunch.  And physical books keep me from reading as much as I’d like to read.  With several books that I wanted to read coupled with all my travel, I got tired of carrying around all these big books.  I knew it was just a matter of time before I jumped in to the Kindle.  Why my research has not been exhaustive, I recently purchased a Kindle Wifi (no 3G, 6” B&W) model for the following reasons.

• It was small and light.  Could fit into my moleskin notebook that I carry around.
• E-ink, low power and I could read in direct sunlight
• I could read at night before bed.  Having light hit your eyes right before you go to bed disrupts your sleep patterns.  I don’t watch TV or read computers before I go to bed.
• 3500 books, periodicals, journals, emails, PDF’s could be stored on it.  Very convenient for carrying around and reading when I have a moment.
• It’s not a computer with a lot of stuff popping up or other distractions.  When I read, I want to focus and concentrate without interruption.
• Very easy to hook up to wireless networks to get content
• Didn’t want the 3G as that is old school.  Plus they charge you if you send personal documents over their 3G network.  I have a 4G phone in my pocket that can operate as a wifi hotspot.  If I want to connect, I fire up my 4G hotspot, connect and disconnect when I’m done.  4G speed vs. 3G is way better.  The entire book is on my device before I even get out of the Kindle store back to the home screen to read it.  No additional charges either.  If I have a long email that I want to read/study, I just email it my Kindle and it’s there with everything else.
• Lots of free content
• Long battery life.  10 days if I have the wifi turned on, 30 days if I don’t.  More than enough juice to read on a cross-country or international trip.
• Kindle format is like my e-book PDF format.  Kindle would be my “portable book format” PBF vs. “portable document format (PDF)”  Get all my reading sources to Kindle format and I’m good to go.  I’m even starting to favor books/periodicals that make it easy to read on my Kindle.
• Multi-device support .  I can download a free app and run on my Android HTC phone or my laptop.  Normally I just read on my Kindle but if I have a journal that has a lot of color charts and graphs I want to consult, I do that on my laptop.  Also good if I’m studying a particular book and need to go back and forth through the pages.
• I liked it so much, I am getting my wife one for Mothers Day and my 12 yr son one for school.  I would rather him reading than watching TV or playing video games.  He’s been begging for one and now at $139, the price is right!

A few months ago, I was contacted through the Advance2000 website (www.advance2000.com) by a University of Montreal student.  Her name was Tzu-Chen Ariel Lai (Ariel) and she wanted to know if it was possible for her and another student to use our Advance2000 BIM cloud service to design a project that was due for one of her courses.  Given our services focus with colleges and universities as well as the AEC industry for our BIM cloud solution, I thought this would be a great use of our BIM Cloud.  While I have seen similar benefits of collaboration in firms, I wanted to see how easy it would be for Architecture students to pick up on cloud computing and work.

All I asked in return is a report of her project and her experience working in the cloud.  Those reports are included here in this blog.  I was amazed how quickly they picked up on the technology and how little they contacted Advance2000 for support.  They were off to the races!

Here is their studio project:
Eroded Tower Studio Project





And here is their full report:
Full Studio Project Report



Ariel/Elodie, you get a "A" in my book.  Great job and best of luck to you both.  Let me if there is anything I can do to help you in the future.

- Chris France

On Thursday April 21, 2011 Amazon’s Web Services that is used by many companies to host their websites, databases, and other corporate computing systems went down or bounced offline for 11 hours.  This is bad and very visible, especially for the pioneer of “cloud computing”.  But does it mean that because Amazon went down we should shy away from the cloud? 

Not at all. 

Every experienced IT professional has experienced down time either from hardware, software, telecom, fiber cuts, HVAC outage, human error, etc.  If you haven’t you have been very lucky or not in IT long enough.  Technology will break and humans will make errors—it’s how fast you get back online that matters.  It also matters if you’ve lost data.  Amazon didn’t lose any data; they lost connectivity for a bit.  Many firms will lose data and that’s a million times worse than losing connectivity.

When a cloud provider like Amazon goes down, there’s usually a perfect storm.  Three or more things have to happen for them to go down.  And no matter how bullet-proof you think you are, I can come up with scenarios that will bring you down.  I can remember losing a data volume, an email server getting corrupted, and it was stressful when things go down.  But for the most part, the sun still came up the next day and the outage was not life threatening.  Smaller firms have much less redundancy and that 11 hour Amazon outage might have been a 2-3 day outage.  Recall Google had an outage and I know very large corporations that had outages that tried to keep it out of the papers.  It happens.  Now if it keeps happening, maybe it’s time to find a new cloud provider but ditching the cloud because of this visible outage would be a bad decision.  So what will you do—stay away from a cloud provider so that you can run on your infrastructure that is less protected from outages?  That would be called throwing the baby out with the bath water.  

Outage protection is like a big insurance policy.  How much redundant equipment, software, networks, and people can you afford to keep from going down?  Then you have to add some sanity to the business case.  You don’t want to spend $1000 to protect $100.  Figure out how much revenue/day your firm generates from the systems you deploy.  Then figure out your single points of failure and how much it would cost to eliminate those single points.  Then you’ve got a good benchmark with which to spend.  If you generate $1MM per day, then it might make sense to spend an extra $200,000 per year to improve your operational effectiveness.  On the flip side, if your firm makes $500,000 per year in revenue you are not going to spend an additional $200,000 to make it more redundant.

And guess what?  As you systematically remove your single points of failure, you start looking for cost-effective solutions to add this redundancy.  When you reach the end of this rainbow, your datacenter and operational plan will look very similar to a cloud provider like Amazon.

 

Advance2000 Private Cloud + Verizon 4G LTE network – Things are getting downright interesting!

Well I just got my new HTC Thunderbolt from Verizon with the 4G capabilities.  I got to say, it’s my best phone ever and that includes my old Iphone that I had to dump because of the spotty network connections where I seemed to travel.  I debated on waiting for the Motorola Bionic but I’m glad I didn’t.  Until the end of May my wifi service (aircard) is free.  I can turn my HTC into a 4G wifi hotspot (wireless tethering).  This will eventually cost me $20/month but it allowed me to shut off my $55/month Clear card, thus saving $35/month.  I was wondering what the battery would be like and it’s not bad if you don’t use your phone.  But now with the 4G capabilities, I burn through batteries.  Soon an extended battery will be available and I have two regular ones.  Keep your charger handy.  It’s not a big deal because I am using it all the time.  Just plug it in when you’re using as a wifi hotspot.

So now what about cloud computing?  While the 4G speed is very fast for downloading email, attachments, applications, and surfing, it is just OK for real-time computing like RDP or PCoIP to a cloud.  I connected up to the Advance2000 Private Cloud running an architectural application (Revit) over a 4G network.  Just that was a pretty cool feat—couldn’t really do that before 4G.  I was doing real work on a wireless network.  PCoIP will theoretically run a remote desktop at 300ms latency but you will see some choppyness.  It’s kind of like hitting a website where sometimes it loads fast and sometimes it takes a bit.  If I had a 250ms latency connection on my 4G phone, I probably wouldn’t want to work on that for 8 hrs, but to login, check a critical system or data store, it works really well.   If you are fortunate enough to get a sub-100ms latency, you really can work on the cloud from the air.   I couldn’t even do this on a 3G network.  My guess is that Verizon is expecting a huge load on their 4G network and is adding that latency on purpose to keep the real-computing to a minimum.  But I don’t know that for a fact.

 

Here’s my laptop in Costa Mesa CA connected to my 4G phone wifi.  Interesting how the upload speeds are faster than downloads.

 

Costa Mesa Starbucks – I could not get a good 4G signal so I couldn’t work.

 

Time Warner Cable Roadrunner Wideband (30x5) from my house.  This connection is VERY conducive to cloud computing and running full IP telephony from the cloud.

 

This is my 4G wifi from my house in Waxhaw NC.  Not quite like my wideband connection but this blows away a DSL connection:

 

4G from Charlotte Airport Wired.  BTW, I forgot to mention that I can connect my laptop to my 4G phone in one of two ways.  Direct connect via USB cable or wireless via the wifi hotspot.  I think I get better performance with a direct USB connection:

Speedtest in Charlotte airport with direct USB connection: