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Articles on this page are written by SYSTECH’s staff to share technology information and offer topics for discussion with your Systech Business Technology Specialist  

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An article by Jack Prager, President of Systech Information Services, Inc.                             February, 2009

 

A sound network environment – a solid foundation    

I would like to take a moment to discuss the importance of environmental issues regarding network environments.  It is sometimes difficult to understand that server and networking equipment is much different than the equipment many of us use in our home.  The lines between home and corporate use of computer equipment have been blurred for years.

As we all become more dependent on technology we have also become more comfortable with this technology and its presence.  Familiarity sometimes can lead to complacency.  Technology is all around us and it is expected to always be available to us.  Yet, as it becomes more common place, we become further removed from the understanding of the components that make it work.

 

When the power in our homes is lost due to storm, we all quickly discover that a single point of failure causes extreme distress. It becomes clear a backup generator and a battery backup for the sump pump would have helped control any damage done to our homes due to loss of power. 

 

As a business grows and their requirements for technology increase, complexity is often added as well.  It becomes harder to determine what is necessary to protect those critical systems until a loss or failure occurs.  Sometimes we can go for many years and not have a critical failure due to weather conditions or unexpected area power failure.

 

Human nature then begins to tell us the possibility of these types of critical failures is small.  We begin to convince ourselves that it can’t happen to us because it hasn’t happened yet. Therefore any protection and or preparation is placed on the back burner, other issues become more pressing.

  

Proper planning and execution as related to IT management is essential to reducing liability and therefore costs associated with downtime, lost production and unbudgeted expense.  A good foundation is critical to a successful corporate networking infrastructure. 

 

When skyscrapers were first beginning to pervade the landscape in Chicago the builders had to create a sound foundation on which to construct their towering buildings.  Chicago’s land was not ideal for this purpose and they had to develop a method where they would drill holes a hundred feet into the loose and mucky soil till they hit solid bedrock.  They would then fill these holes with concrete to create what they called a caisson foundation.  After which they could be confident that they had a solid foundation on which to build.  Much the same way, we must remember that in order to build a sustainable corporate network a solid foundation is required.

 

A solid foundation for a corporate network begins with providing a sound environment for the equipment required by the network.  Temperature, power, humidity, cleanliness and a secure location are all things that should be controlled so that the network equipment can function without interruption or degradation.

 

The most pervasive of these environmental conditions in my estimation is temperature. Electronics can be severely affected by high heat temperature or merely degraded.  The obvious problem here is that increased temperature that doesn’t cause immediate failure will cause degradation and may lead to failure days, weeks or months after an overheating event.  Further complicating the problem, when electronic devices are exposed to cycling temperatures, such as a consistent pattern in which room temperature is increased daily and then lowered in the evening, detrimental effects are increased dramatically.

 

An excerpt from a document by IBM engineers Schmidt and Notohardjono titled “High-End Server, Low-Temperature Cooling” from November 2002, states the following regarding electronic devices reliability and temperature. 

 

“Reliability

Lowering the chip temperature is expected to improve the reliability of the overall system. Nearly all degradation mechanisms in electronic devices, such as interdiffusion, corrosion, and electromigration, have a thermal-activation component that follows the Arrhenius relationship. Since the rate of degradation decreases exponentially with decreasing temperature, orders of magnitude improvement in reliability could be expected with cooling. However, although the effect of temperature on reliability has been thoroughly verified empirically for elevated temperatures, it has yet to be demonstrated for reduced temperatures in densely populated chips. Detrimental effects of mechanical stress and strains which result from differences in thermal expansion of the various materials used in electronic components, coupled with local and overall temperature differences, arise when the system is cycled between room temperature and a low operating temperature. The magnitude of such effects on circuit performance and reliability must be considered when the temperature excursions are from room temperature to system operation below room temperature”  

 

What does all this mean to you and your business?  It means that it is critical to control the physical environment in which your server and network equipment resides.  In this way, you will maintain the quality of the equipment.  Reduce your support costs.  Increase the reliability of your network.  Reduce network downtime and thereby increase the productivity of your personnel.

 

To recap, the environment in which your servers and network gear reside should include controls for the following:

 

1. Temperature

2. Power

3. Humidity

4. Cleanliness

5. Physical Security

 

If these items are not controlled there is a significant increase in risk.  These risks include but are not limited to hardware failure and data loss.

 

In environments where these conditions are not well controlled it makes hardware redundancies and data backups all the more critical to reduce or eliminate data loss and loss of network services.  However, this in no way supplants proper environmental controls.

 

The responsibility for these day to day controls and procedures can only be conducted by the business themselves.  Systech can provide guidance, instruction and in many cases implementation of solutions to control these conditions.  Customers participating in the new proactive “managed services” plans Systech is providing will be required to provide the proper environments for their equipment.

 

If you have any concerns over these matters or would like to further discuss issues that are directly related to your corporate environment contact Systech at info@systechinfo.com .  I would welcome the opportunity to meet with you.

 

 

Article by Gunter Schaub, Systech Information Services, Inc.                                                           October, 2008

 

Infrastructure Optimization

More than likely you have become familiar with this term during the last couple of years.  Maybe one of Systech’s tech specialists mentioned it to you and possibly spoke to you at length about what it involves, and how it can benefit the functionality, operation and management of your business network.

You may have read about in some of the IT industry publications your technology staff subscribes to and passes around.  Infrastructure optimization has evolved as a readily understood phrase to identify what probably is the best upgrade for improving your business network and controlling the costs associated with your business technology.

Let’s take a look at the phrase a little closer and get the definition and the concept clear in our mind.  For reasons I can’t explain, I still remember to this day the grade school vocabulary lesson where I learned the meaning of “optimum.”  Our teacher made sure we first understood the definitions of “minimum” and “maximum” and then identified optimum as a point between min and max where everything was “just right.”  It was further explained as being a relative point that varied depending upon the situation or condition of what was being discussed.  For me what I took away from the lesson of the day was optimum referred to the best something could or should be.

So, to put optimum into the context of your business technology it refers to making certain your network design is just right for your business needs and is configured to be the best it can be.

“Infrastructure” as it relates to business technology is a term which, from my personal experience, has come into popular usage primarily in the last few years.  For a long time, the components of business technology were referred to and divided into hardware and software.  In the early days of network servers and desktop PCs, we would say “if you can pick it up or kick it, it was hardware.”  

Today, infrastructure is used to identify all the components of your business network other than the particular application software you are using to run your business.   In common usage, one hears the term infrastructure used most often in the context of our roads, bridges and highways.  Staying with this analogy for a moment, one could compare our nation’s highway system (bridges, roads, access ramps, etc.) to the hardware of your network.

The road signs, speed limit signs and traffic signals can be compared to the operating systems on your network servers and desktop work stations.  The cars, trucks, buses, etc. on our highways, the sole purpose for our highway system, can be compared to the data your networks controls, routes and stores.  To finish our analogy, our highways infrastructure includes all roads, bridges and traffic control signs and, by the comparison we’ve been making, your network infrastructure includes all of your computer hardware, the routers and cables connecting them and the operating systems that control your networks data flow. 

Taking our analogy full-circle, it can be easily seen our nation’s road system has been designed with the concept of “optimization” in mind.  It’s the reason you don’t have an eight-lane highway in front of your house and you don’t have a two-lane road where a super highway should be.  Our nation’s civil engineers have made certain, as much as possible, to design right-size roads for the anticipated traffic volume. 

Now let’s take a look at your business network and talk about how it has grown and expanded as your company itself has grown, prospered and expanded.  Unless you had the opportunity to recently optimize your business technology infrastructure or you’ve been fortunate enough to rebuild your entire network to meet your current and future needs, your network today is the result of frequent upgrades, additions, alterations and adjustments.  Many networks have evolved this way and as a result they include technology detours, bottlenecks and occasional dead ends, all of which contribute to a network operation often suffering from slowdown, shut down (crashes) and inefficiency. 

You can rest assured, if your network has expanded in incremental steps, you are not alone.  The very realization that many business networks have grown up in this way brought the information technology industry to coin the “infrastructure optimization” phrase. 

Systech Information Services, Inc., under the guidance of Jack Prager, is now entering its fifteenth year of operation.  If you think back to 1994 and look at how much business network technology has changed since then, you can appreciate the vast knowledge Systech has garnered and mastered regarding business networks and their design, installation and maintenance.  In fact, a few months ago, Systech was recognized by Microsoft as a Gold Certified Partner, the highest tier of technology partners by this leader of the information technology industry. 

Systech recognizes “Infrastructure Optimization” as the most important step you can take to update your business network and assure yourself your business technology is designed and sized just right for your needs today, tomorrow and for the years ahead.  Systech further understands infrastructure optimization is a process involving detailed analysis of your business, learning your plans and goals and evaluating your network setup of today and working with you side-by-side to provide you with business technology that’s just right and the best it can be. 

To this end let’s take a look how Systech will proceed as we assist you in optimizing your network infrastructure:

1. We meet with you and your technical staff to discuss your business focus, your business operation and your plans for growth and expansion
2. We review your current network installation, number of network users, data processing volume and network security 
3. We identify the strength and weaknesses of your current installation with an eye toward network efficiencies and data security  
4. We look at the overall process of your business network and evaluate your disaster recovery procedures in the event of network failure 

This evaluation process will lead us to a jointly reached proposal of what additions, changes and adjustments are necessary to enable you to optimize your business technology and assure yourself it is designed and conceived to be just right for your current and future business operation. 

The end result of this process is to increase your network productivity, lower your network management costs and increase your data and network security.  

Infrastructure Optimization is a process that you must undertake to assure your business technology continues to support your business operation.

Contact SYSTECH Now for immediate assistance with optimizing your business technology