Have you ever thought that there was something missing from your Internet experience?  Well, I have and it all began over twenty years ago at a pre-COMPAQ era HP seminar (back then, HP’s greatest claim to fame was networking equipment).  During that conference, they showed a video of how they viewed the future of the Internet.  In that video they described how an employee (that is, human) in New York (pick your city) would tell his “agent” (a computer program or automaton) to do something for him in Singapore (again, pick your city).  I’m still waiting for that kind of Internet interaction to become widely available.

Compared to what I’ve just described, today’s Internet interactions (or transactions) are very “passive”.  When we enter a keyword into Google (or Yahoo, et. al.) on our favorite browser, we are receiving in return a static information report that Google has previously dredged up from the data available on the Internet.  When we ask Google to show us an image of something, it is again something that was previously stored on a server somewhere beyond our reach.  All of this is very passive in nature.

The other option is, obviously, to have a more “active” Internet.  That is, one where we tell the Internet (or rather our “agent”) to do something unique to our situation.  We see the beginnings of that today when we take control of our office desktop computer from our Smartphones.  In the not to distant future (being a Luddite I might not be aware that it is already possible), you will be able to tell your “agent” via your “phone” that you want it to take an inventory of your refrigerator (that would be a smart refrigerator) and order from the local supermarket any missing essentials to be delivered to your doorstep (or other repository) to await your arrival at home (there already exist supermarkets that provide this delivery service).   Or, you might consult via “phone” the status of your late model transportation device (or whatever you call the futuristic vehicle that drives you to work automatically) and, seeing that it requires servicing, tell it to obtain a service appointment and drive itself to the service depot (of course, you will also request that it return in time for the evening rush hour).  It’s even not too far fetched to have your “agent”, travel across the Internet to distant lands in order to return a picture or live video feed from a construction site that your company manages where it would allocate some time from one of the video devices in that area that isn’t even owned by you (we see such events on TV all of the time these days).

In reality, even today analogous activities of this nature are already occurring.  The issue is that because of their current nature and our viewpoints toward them, we see them as illegal rather than the precursors of something valuable and useful.  Today’s “active” agents are the ones employed by bot-nets (which are collections of servers that run mal-ware designed to reap passwords and valuable information from unsuspecting user’s computers).  Setting up bot-nets and malware or even computer viruses (a communicable agent bent on disrupting your pleasant computing experience) is something that is not available to the casual Internet user because it requires knowledge and expertise in a low-level language.  In the field of computer programming, a low-level language is one that deals with machine languages (that is, programming in binary numbers which represent computer instruction codes) and other elemental aspects of the system being programmed.  While it certainly possible to program at a low-level, this is primarily the domain of individuals who are commonly called “hackers” (by the way, there are both good and bad hackers).  You and I, however, don’t have such capabilities.  What we need that is a higher-level language which would be one that simplifies the generation of our favorite “agent” because of its user friendly look and feel.  Unfortunately, there is currently no such language available that I know of.

At any rate, one thing I do know is that when it comes to security issues, computer hardware maintenance, and systems acquisition the trained engineering and sales staff at SOVRAN, Inc. is a valuable resource for resolving whatever issue that may occur.

Written by: Harley Stauffer, Systems Engineer

Author: Sovran – Technology Solutions for Business -

There’s the public cloud, and there’s the private cloud. You can also have both.

by Gene Rebeck
April 19, 2013

In the simplest terms, cloud computing allows companies to share software and other applications and capabilities across a digital network. Industry statistics and anecdotal evidence both show a fast-growing use of cloud IT services, though they remain a small part of total U.S. business IT spend. What makes cloud computing a bit cloudy for many is the fact that there’s more than one cloud. There’s the public cloud, which is familiar to anyone who has ever used Google Apps (which most notably include e-mail, documents, and spreadsheet capabilities) or Rackspace (server space) or Salesforce.com (CRM). The public cloud lets companies “rent” server space, software, and other services on an as-needed basis, with the promise of greatly lowering a company’s IT costs.

There are also private clouds, which function as in-house clouds, central repositories of data and applications that can be accessed across departments and locations, and even by different devices. A hybrid of public and private clouds is the most popular configuration.

The cloud can’t be taken lightly. “People can’t necessarily jump in with both feet and say, ‘Well, I’m going into the cloud,’” says Brian Arneson, president and COO of Sovran, Inc., an Eagan-based IT consulting firm with a large cloud computer practice. Companies need to look carefully at numerous considerations besides costs, including legal issues and their existing IT infrastructure.

What Is the Cloud?

SaaS turned out to be just the start. “You can go to Amazon Web Services and literally spin up a server on a public shared infrastructure on Amazon’s environment,” says Arneson, noting that Amazon is just one of many infrastructure-as-a-service providers. “It’s truly a utility model—just like you pay for access to your electric company or your gas company. You’re paying strictly on usage—both memory and CPU and storage.” What’s more, you’re getting scalability, and you’re getting it cheap—much cheaper than if you had to add more of your own servers. That’s also true of vendors offering data storage as a service. Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud environment, for instance, allows for up to 25 gigabytes of storage per user.

For seasonal businesses such as retailers, the cloud can provide additional server capacity as needed. “You scale up as you need it, scale back down when you don’t,” Arneson notes. All told, he believes that the cloud is particularly advantageous when it comes to “commodity-type services” such as e-mail. Office 365, Google Apps, and other providers can deliver services “consistently and reliably on a public cloud environment at mass scale,” Arneson says. “It’s a commodity-type solution, and can be managed across hundreds and thousands of customers. Therefore you drive the cost to the floor.”

Most people consider the cloud to comprise IT services that sit on the servers of providers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, or the smaller data centers owned by IT consultants and service providers. In fact, “most businesses have a private cloud,” says Jim Griffith, CEO of Corporate Technologies, an Eden Prairie–based consulting firm whose data center hosts clients’ servers, applications, and offsite backup. If your company has five to 500 computers or one to 50 servers, “you have a private cloud, an IT infrastructure where your programs, resources, applications, data files are accessed by your employees,” Griffith says. A true cloud allows a company’s employees to access information from just about anywhere—workstation, mobile phone, or other device.

A private cloud typically offers less scalability and fewer cost savings than a public cloud. But a private cloud also offers something else—control. You can’t make changes to software that resides in the public cloud and can’t do much customization. Businesses also might have security concerns about storing their data outside of their own firewall, about how well sensitive information is protected. Arneson and other consultants note that highly regulated industries including health care, legal, and financial services prefer—and may be required—to keep the IT on their own servers.

And while some recent studies suggest that public cloud has 99.5 percent reliability versus 98.5 percent for the typical private data center, many companies remain skeptical. High-profile outages, notably those that Amazon data centers have experienced (most recently last June), also gives some businesses pause.

Griffith says that very few of his customers have migrated to public cloud computing. The majority still has at least some of their own IT infrastructure in place. After all, those customers reason, if we moved to the public cloud, we’d be left with unneeded servers and other assets that have very little resale value. Second, Griffith says, the migration of data and other IT to the cloud has significant costs of its own. “What we’re finding is with most of our customers, what they are interested in doing is keeping their existing IT infrastructure in place,” he adds.

Who’s in the Cloud

But private and public aren’t the only clouds in the sky. Arneson says that most of his clients are on a hybrid model, in which some IT services remain on premises, while the rest are “off-prem.” They keep some information and applications under their control, while cloud-sourcing less sensitive material.

“Probably the best success we’re seeing with moving things to the cloud is corporate e-mail,” says Tom Kieffer, CEO of Virteva, an IT consulting firm based in St. Louis Park. “We have many clients now that have looked at their aging Microsoft Exchange e-mail platform and just assumed it was time to buy new servers, new licenses, a new set of software from Microsoft, and hire someone like us to build the whole thing out for them.” For these clients, Virteva suggests using a cloud service such as Office 365. “Nine times out of 10, that’s what they end up doing,” Kieffer says.

Other clients ask Virteva to manage their existing Microsoft Exchange e-mail server environment: “It’s probably the number one thing that we outsource.” In most cases, Virteva moves the client to Office 365. “What people find is that they have a more robust, better performing, more highly featured e-mail platform than they probably had before,” Kieffer says, and an e-mail system that has backup and anti-spam protection built in. “The bad news for us is that it reduces our management fees dramatically,” he adds with a chuckle. Kieffer also sees another aspect of migrating e-mail out of a client’s premises: “It gets people comfortable that this cloud thing can really work.”

Karl Populorum, vice president of sales and marketing for RBA, an IT consulting firm with headquarters in Wayzata, tells the story of one of its large enterprise customers, a traditional manufacturing company with an aging IT infrastructure and 3,000 users worldwide. Instead of going through a major upgrade, the company migrated to the Microsoft Office 365 platform, which includes messaging collaboration and a variety of other applications. The company saved money by abandoning its out-of-date legacy platform and not having to maintain an e-mail server. Where the client had been “allocating all of these internal resources to be able to manage the servers, apply patches, do updates,” Populorum says, “now [it] can just buy that server in the cloud and have feature parity.”

Populorum also notes that while larger enterprises tend to be cautious about cloud computing and how much of its data and IT services to put there, “certain smaller customers, they’re just going to it,” he says. “They’re running their business in the cloud.”

Kieffer’s firm has worked with a number of startups that provide software as a service, and many of them have moved their operations to the cloud, “where they don’t have to worry about every time they sell a few more customers they have to buy another server.

“It’s very rare to find a new software company or a new web services company that isn’t starting in the cloud,” Kieffer says, since operating in the cloud means less capital to get going.

Are We in the Cloud Yet?

The one-size-fits-all nature of the public cloud, however, is another reason established firms remain cautious about it. “There’s not a lot of customization within the public cloud infrastructure because it has to be the same for everyone,” Arneson says.

For instance, many companies’ e-mail systems are integrated with billing, business, and communications systems—“literally right into their phone system,” Arneson notes. The more features and integration a company’s e-mail system has, “the harder it’s going to be to move that capability to the cloud.” Another example is an accounting program such as Intuit’s QuickBooks. Customized versions typically have more features than cloud versions. “You have to decide what you can live with to determine if it’s worth it,” Arneson says.

Populorum sees “a gradual adoption” of cloud computing, particularly the hybrid model. “But overall, there’s a macro trend where it’s accelerating, both because of cost and general acceptance,” he adds. He also believes that “the next big push” in cloud computing is collaboration and sharing information with internal and external partners, such as Microsoft’s SharePoint allows.

A bit like an actual cloud, cloud computing is still changing its shape. Arneson notes that “we’re still in this early-adopter phase”; vendors and products could change. With more players, prices will continue to come down. “Features and capabilities are going to be more robust in the future,” Arneson believes. “It’s changing for the better.”

Author: Sovran – Technology Solutions for Business -

Eagan, MN, April 25, 2013, Sovran Inc announced that Scott Noerenberg has been named Vice President of Sales and Marketing. Scott’s responsibilities including developing and leading the growing sales force as well as to drive the marketing presence of Sovran in the market place.

“I look forward to this great opportunity to be at Sovran as we continue to grow,” states Mr. Noerenberg.  “Building on the strong sales organization we have in place today, I see Sovran as a key client partner, not just a vendor, in the Twin Cities for IT managed services and technology implementations.”

Mr. Noerenberg comes to us with over 25 years of successful field sales and sales management in IT solutions. He draws on experience with NEC Computer Systems of nearly ten years where he was responsible for computer and software sales in a multi-state area before becoming an area manager for the Upper Midwest and parts of Canada.  After leaving NEC Scott managed an inside computer services and products sales team & catalog sales group for the computer systems division of IDEXX Laboratories.  There, he was responsible for developing a small sales team into a stand-alone business turning a profit in its first year and more than doubling sales from the prior years.

Utilizing Scott’s talent including sales team management and development, and strategy development for planned growth in revenue, profit and market share will aid in the Sovran’s rapid growth in the IT industry.

For additional information, please contact Nichole Wrolstad at 651-905-5514.

Sovran is a Minnesota-based technology solutions provider that is equally committed to both customer care and technology. Since 1987, Sovran has been providing customized technology solutions and ongoing services that truly focus on the goals of our customers. In addition, Sovran is now home to Minnesota’s premier IT Training Center, New Horizons Computer Learning Centers Twin Cities. Sovran partners with top manufacturers in the tech industry, including Microsoft, HP, Cisco, VMware, Nimble and more to provide our customers with unparalleled support and integrated IT services.

Author: Sovran – Technology Solutions for Business -

Eagan, MN, April 23, 2013, Sovran is pleased to announce that Mark Espena has joined Sovran as Vice President of Technology and Services.  Mark is responsible for Sovran’s technology roadmap, product development and service delivery strategies.  He plays a crucial role at Sovran in helping to find ways to continue to improve service, grow technology offerings, and leverage all of Sovran’s services to their clients.

“This is an exciting time to come on board and partner with Sovran,” states Mark. “Sovran’s technical staff is second to none and I am proud to be a part of the team.  I look forward to exploring new technologies that will bring cost-effective solutions, as well as an extraordinary service experience, to our clients.”

Mark is coming to Sovran from a Wisconsin-based consulting and CPA firm, where he was an IT Consulting Market Manager for the Minnesota Region.  He was working on rebuilding the managed services practice, positioning cloud services as a new offering, and setting the 3 year plan for the entire company’s IT Outsourcing service.

Mark has over has over 15 years experience in the IT services industry.  He was an original Special Agent at the Geek Squad, the onsite services manager for Chip Heads Computer Repair shop in Richfield, and built his own IT Managed and Professional services business called Escape Key Computing. He started the company from scratch in 2002, doubled its size each year for seven years, and achieved annual recurring revenues approaching $3 million. Escape Key sold to a national IT firm in 2010.  He stayed on board and helped integrate three other acquired companies in Chicago and Detroit while working as a Relationship Manager, accountable for 44 client accounts in the Twin Cities and Chicago totaling over $1.5 million in annual recurring revenue.

Mark’s background and dedication to customer experience is a welcome addition to the Sovran team.

For additional information, please contact Nichole Wrolstad at 651-905-5514.

Sovran is a Minnesota-based technology solutions provider that is equally committed to both customer care and technology. Since 1987, Sovran has been providing customized technology solutions and ongoing services that truly focus on the goals of our customers. In addition, Sovran is now home to Minnesota’s premier IT Training Center, New Horizons Computer Learning Centers Twin Cities. Sovran partners with top firms in the tech industry, including Microsoft, HP, Cisco, VMware, Nimble and more to provide our customers with unparalleled support and integrated IT services.

Author: Sovran – Technology Solutions for Business -

In the good old days (which by the way weren’t always that good), powering a computer system (actually a Super-Computer) required a beefy power supply (or rather sub-system).  The standard power supply for a Control Data 6600 (CDC6600) required a three-phase 400 Hz Alternating Current (AC) source and therefore every system came with a motor-generator set that converted the standard three-phase 60 Hz power supplied by your favorite local utility company from the nearest power pole.  The military was exempt from requiring this extra hardware because they supplied their own 400 Hz power from the mains on the base where the computer would be located.  The nicest feature was that a three-phase 400 Hz power supply produced very little ripple (pure Direct current (DC) has no fluctuating voltage or current) when it was converted to DC. (see http://s7.computerhistory.org/is/image/CHM/102627359-03-01?$re-inline-artifact$, which is from a photo-op sited in the lobby of the CDC HQ Building in Bloomington.  Note the black-topped cross-shaped device at the right is the top of the system itself with the rest of the picture displaying various peripheral devices now equally as extinct as the mainframe itself.)

At the ends of each of the four wings of the CDC6600, there was an attached cabinet about the size of today’s computer server racks that housed the “power supply”.  Although its appearance is radically different from today’s server power supplies, it had all of the standard features that are found even today.  That is, it housed electrical control components and a source of cooling.  In the upper portion (at the right side of the picture), you will see the controllable voltage meters (the large round dials) for each of the 4 hugely heavy chassis of electronic modules contained in that wing.  The lower portion contains the cooling unit in its own protective steel frame cage.  The cooling unit contained a compressor that circulated the Freon coolant through that wing’s chassis’ (for those who are environmentally sensitive, later models went to water-cooling and even air-cooling).  The left side of the picture shows 10 silver rectangles that are the backs of 10 magnetic core stacks of 4K – 12 bit/words memory each.  With 10 other rectangles (not shown) below, they combined to create 16K of 60-bit/word memory.  If you can find the red rectangular loop of twisted-pair wire, you will have found a clue that tells you that on this machine critical timing was controlled by adjusting the lengths of its wiring.  But I digress and grow ever more nostalgic.

Today (and for most of the history of the PC style of computer), things are different.  Typically, you will find the power cord (with a funny plug on one end of it) plugged into a metal box that is separately housed within the computer’s chassis itself.  But similar to the description above, it contains the electrical power components (no meters are present for economic purposes) and a cooling subsystem that is just a simple fan.  Just as the evolution of computer technology has gone from the gigantic to the compact (and even hand-held), this PC power supply is much smaller than that of the predecessor mainframes. (see http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/62/PSU-Open1.jpg/220px-PSU-Open1.jpg which shows the fan opening in the foreground with the black 6-sided power cord receptacle to its right.  The cable exiting the rear carries the many different voltages required by the modern PC.)

If you do a Google Image search on “HP Power Supply”, you will be amazed at the number of different supplies displayed. It seems that there is a different power supply for each different computer system they produce (you can multiply the number of different power supplies that HP has by the number of other computer manufacturers to come to the overwhelming number of power supplies that are currently available).  All these different models of power supplies represents many man-hours of engineering effort to design supplies that meet the unique physical and electrical specifications of each slightly different computer system.  This fact has not been lost on HP (which for a very long time has been known for its engineering prowess).  Thus they have come up with a concept which they call “Common Slot (CS) Power Supplies”. By this, they are indicating that the external physical and electrical connection specifications of all of their server power supplies are now identical.  That is, any power supply they produce will fit in any of their servers.  The catch is that any given server may require more or less power than a given power supply can deliver.  Thus, power supplies are available in 460W, 750W, and 1200W models.  Which one is required depends on how much power the server requires.  As an extra bonus, HP has increased the efficiency of these power supplies to 94% (in engineering, efficiency is measured as the amount of energy leaving the system divided by the amount entering). Therefore, with these products, you get more power (or energy) out of them in the most compact (diminutive) form factor possible.

As the cost of energy continues to increase it only makes sense to make sure that one is making the wisest investment in new computer hardware.  That’s where the combined engineering and sales support staff at SOVRAN, Inc. becomes valuable because they are able to design a right-sized solution that meets your electrical and economical specifications.

Written by: Harley Stauffer, Systems Engineer

Author: Sovran – Technology Solutions for Business -

The new Office is completely modernized to change the world of work. For one thing, it works great across all your devices, including an immersive, touch-optimized experience for Windows 8 devices. The new Office is re-architected to leverage the power of the cloud, providing Office as a service—on-demand, wherever you need it, and always up to date. It also lets people work in new, more productive ways by bringing social networking to the enterprise. And, it simplifies deployment and management tasks with a re-imagined installation process and an improved administration console.

Whether you are purchasing Office through an Open License program, Office 365, retail product or using your Software Assurance benefits, you will quickly discover the new features and productivity enhancement in each of the packages.  From the ability to open and edit a .PDF in Word or the ability to see the next slide in your Powerpoint presentation the new enhancement are plentiful.  Unlike previous version, Office is designed to take full advantage of the Cloud offerings by Microsoft.  Consumer products, such as SkyDrive, have made it to the enterprise with SkyDrive Pro and Sharepoint 2013 online.  All make it easy to save, share and collaborate with others, especially when you combine the New Office with the Windows 8 experience and new Office365.

Still not enough enhancements to give it a try?  Let’s point out the major upgrades and new features:

• Open and edit .PDF documents directly in Word.  No more third part apps to make it happen!
• SkyDrive integration across the entire suite. If you allow it, every document, presentation, notebook, and doo-dad is saved to your SkyDrive folder. This gives you access from any internet-capable device and also provides a solid backup
• Excel has a new “Flash Fill” that recognizes patterns in your data and fills in remaining cells automatically.
• Excel now has social network integration.
•  Lync now allows you to share presentations online as well.
• Skype integration.
• Track Changes are less cumbersome, just click a red line to expand the thread that includes edits and notes.
• PowerPoint presenters in slideshow mode now have new “behind the scenes” features. This includes a new Navigation Grid. This gives you teleprompter-style notes on the back end of that your audience never sees.
• Office will only run on Windows 7 or Windows 8, despite 50% of PC users being on Windows XP or Vista.
• Office 365 revamped to make navigation quicker and easier to manage.
• Touch Mode, a more touch friendly way to use Office.
• Resume Read via SkyDrive. Documents stored on SkyDrive will save the page you are currently reading and allow to continue reading across multiple internet-capable devices.
• Threaded comments and the ability to add comments anywhere on the margin.
• Built-in Handwriting recognition software for touch-screens.
• The option for subscription pricing instead of buying it in the box or volume license
• Improved start/welcome pages. This makes PowerPoint less scary for beginners, and that is important.
• Improved alignment system, objects stick and line up better. If you use Photoshop this new system in Office 2013 might seem a little familiar.
• In read mode you can zoom in on objects that were scaled down to fit on the page. This comes in handy seeing pictures in their original size.
• Simultaneous online co-authoring. Microsoft has taken another note from Google on this one. Now everyone on your team can jump into a doc using the web app and edit it at the same time.
• OneNote allows you to insert entire files, not just pictures and links..
• OneNote has a mobile app for Android, iPhone, iOS. This makes it available everywhere, all the time.
• Exchange ActiveSync works with Hotmail, Gmail, and other popular email services that aren’t run on a private Microsoft Exchange server.
• Outlook connects with Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks. This lets you receive status updates.
• Outlook calendars can now be shared directly from the app. This is a huge simplification of the process! There is also a built-in weather bar with a 3-day forecast

Along with the enhancements, there are a few licensing changes that you have to take in to account.  You still have the option of retail product and volume licensing along with the new options of a subscription through Office365.  What licensing option is right for you?  That is a good reason to engage your Sovran sales representative.  They can assist you in reviewing the options and what program will provide the maximum benefit at a cost that is within your budget.

Written By: John Tuschner

Author: Sovran – Technology Solutions for Business -

If you’ve had any dealings with Cisco in the past year, you’ve most likely heard someone mention “BE6K”.  Cisco’s ever-evolving Communications Manager Business Edition platform is on its latest, and most exciting, revision.  While its namesake, Business Edition 6000, has been around for a few years, version 9.0 promises to change the game.  Cisco has been hard at work adding features, and completely repackaging this solution.

Not familiar with the Cisco Business Edition?  Here’s a quick history:  Beginning with the original Cisco Unified Communications Manager Business Edition (a.k.a. Business Edition 5000), Cisco started offering a basic UC solution, consisting of Communications Manager (call processing) and Unity Connection (unified messaging) packaged on one box (Cisco MCS server).  The 5000 is still available for sale today, and according to Cisco, will be under support for years to come.

As Cisco’s Collaboration portfolio grew, demand increased for these applications.  Another trend taking place was companies moving their servers to a virtualized infrastructure.  Cisco’s enterprise UC servers were being virtualized onto Cisco UCS servers, in supported configurations.  Following this model, Cisco launched the original Cisco Unified Communications Manager Business Edition 6000 (they’ve since shortened the official title to Business Edition 6000).  Originally, this solution was offered with Communications Manager, Unity Connection, and Unified Provisioning Manager, with an option to add Unified Presence, Contact Center Express, or Unified Attendant Console all virtualized on a UCS C200 M2 server.  With an upper limit of 1000 users, the capabilities, of the Business Edition 6000 far exceeded those of the 5000.  The virtual server based architecture of the 6000 also makes it much more scalable.  As companies, and their collaboration needs grow (for instance, adding Presence and a Contact Center), new servers can be added seamlessly.

As stated earlier, the Business Edition platform is an ever-evolving solution.  The current generation of the 6000 has some important changes.  Specifically, Cisco has increased the number of servers to 5, and the bundle now comes loaded on a UCS C220 M3 server.  Additionally, the collaboration application choices have doubled.  The BE6000 version 9.0 currently consists of Unified Communications Manager, Unity Connection, Instant Messaging and Presence, Prime Collaboration Manager (formerly Unified Provisioning Manager), and Enterprise License Manager (co-resident on the Communications Manager server), plus you have the option to add Telepresence Video Communications, Unified Contact Center Express, Unified Attendant Console, WebEx Web Conferencing, and Emergency Responder.  Unofficially, there have been rumors of a paging server being added as well.

Cisco has pooled many resources to create and refine the latest Business Edition 6000 offering – and rightly so.  It’s very much in-demand.  As the UCS and Collaboration portfolios grow, so will the Cisco Business Edition suite.  Look for further enhancements to this powerful platform!

Rick Randgaard, Sovra Systems Engineer

Author: Sovran – Technology Solutions for Business -

Sixth-Annual Report, Formerly the MSPmentor 100, Lists
The World’s Top 501 Managed Service Providers (MSPs)

February 26, 2013: Sovran, Inc has landed on Nine Lives Media’s sixth-annual MSPmentor 501 Global Edition (http://www.mspmentor.net/top501), a distinguished list and report identifying the world’s top 501 managed service providers (MSPs). This year’s report has been expanded extensively to include:

• New:      MSPmentor 501 Global Edition
• New:      MSPmentor 100 Small Business Edition (top MSPs with 10 or fewer employees)
• MSPmentor 200 North America Edition
• MSPmentor 50 EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) Edition
• MSPmentor 25 AANZ (Asia, Australia, New Zealand)      Edition
• New: In-depth      data tracking mobile device management (MDM), managed cloud services and      other recurring revenue opportunities for MSPs.

“Sovran is proud to have been recognized as one of the world’s top MSP’s.  This is a testament to our employee achievements and ultimately our client satisfaction.”  said Brian Arneson, President/COO, Sovran.  “We are deeply committed to serving our clients in an exceptional way.”
The MSPmentor 501 report is based on data from MSPmentor’s global online survey conducted October-December 2012. The MSPmentor 501 report recognizes top managed service providers based on a range of metrics, including annual managed services revenue growth, revenue per employee, managed services offered and customer devices managed.

“MSPmentor congratulates Sovran on this honor,” said Amy Katz, president of Nine Lives Media, a division of Penton Media. “Qualifying for our MSPmentor 501 Global Edition puts Sovran in rare company.”

MSPs on this year’s global 501 list lifted their combined annual recurring revenues 24.5 percent to $2.54 billion. Together, those MSPs now manage more than 5.6 million PCs and servers, and nearly 400,000 smartphones and tablets, according to Joe Panettieri, editorial director, Nine Lives Media.

MSPmentor, produced by Nine Lives Media, is the ultimate guide to managed services. MSPmentor features the industry’s top-ranked blog, research, Channel Expert Hour Webcasts and FastChat videos. It is the number one online media destination for managed service providers in the world.

About Sovran:

Sovran is a Minnesota-based technology solutions provider that is equally committed to both customer care and technology. Since 1987, Sovran has been providing customized technology solutions and ongoing services that truly focus on the goals of our customers. In addition, Sovran is now home to Minnesota’s premier IT Training Center, New Horizons Computer Learning Centers Twin Cities. Sovran partners with top firms in the tech industry, including Microsoft, HP, Cisco, VMware, Nimble and more to provide our customers with unparalleled support and integrated IT services.

About Nine Lives Media
Nine Lives Media, a division of Penton Media (http://www.penton.com), defines emerging IT media markets and disrupts established IT media markets. The company’s IT channel-centric online communities include MSPmentor (http://www.MSPmentor.net), The VAR Guy (http://www.TheVARguy.com) and Talkin’ Cloud (http://www.TalkinCloud.com).

Author: Sovran – Technology Solutions for Business -

My first job as a computer engineer was to write hardware diagnostic computer programs for a major super-computer manufacturer.  Of course, in their wisdom, my managers did not allow me (an untested neophyte) to jump right into writing for their valuable super-computers but rather for large non-super-computers (would you believe that they occupied more real-estate than a super-computer).  By and large, the diagnostics I wrote were simplistic, linear lists of instructions with an occasional loop to allow the hardware engineers to find hardware bugs with an oscilloscope and to change the data to be used in the next pass of the test.  Thus my main qualifications for eventual laying my hands on an actual super-computer were that I could copy, enhance, modify, and debug code quite proficiently (an asset when dealing with scarce and expensive super-computer resources).  Nothing, however, prepared me for the terror (or horrors) of writing for a parallel-processing super-computer where the linear sequence of instructions no longer led to the same results as it had on the old linearly executing machines that I had always been my familiar playground.  By the way, did you know that the “Hmm” in the title is a recognized legal word in the Scrabble dictionary?

It turns out that I was in good company with a host of other people who had trod the same path, including the very famous original designer of that super-computer system.  That designer recognized that some instructions took longer to execute than others.  For example, to move data between registers (or even execute a Boolean or bit-wise operation) was quick because all the data was held in very fast logic and required very few steps (which by the way are called “clock cycles”).  On the other hand and in spite of advanced hardware algorithms, floating point arithmetic (that is, arithmetic involving numbers composed of a base number multiplied by ten to some power) such as division and multiplication took many times more clock cycles for the data to filter through the system’s algorithm before the answer reached its destination register.  If you think about it, that would leave enough “waste” time for the system to simultaneously (or nearly simultaneously) load two more registers to be used in the next woefully slow arithmetic instruction.  I don’t know if you can see this train wreck coming yet, but consider what happens if you load a register in which the currently executing parallel arithmetic operation will be writing its result.  This situation in the programming world is called a bug, but in some cases it could be called a diagnostic trick for determining whether the machine was a serial (that is, linear) processing system or a parallel processing system (by the way, that company made both types in identical cabinets and with similar model numbers).  This type of bug was so vexing that it almost caused the parallel processing system to not be built in the first place due to the headaches it caused for the designer.  Eventually, he created a reservation system (which he called a “scoreboard”) for the registers and functional units (that is, the several independent sections of hardware dedicated to a particular type of mathematical operation) that prevented this from happening.   Unfortunately, this didn’t fix the bug.  Think through the programming sequence given above and you will find that, with the scoreboard, the arithmetic result is overwritten by the register load operation whereas, without the scoreboard, the arithmetic result overwrites the register load results.  Thus, the results in either case may or may not be considered a programming bug.  In a situation like this, it’s the hardware designer that becomes the winner and not the programmer.

While life could be interesting in the 262K by 60-bit memory world of the parallel CPU mentioned above, these systems also had a diminutive set of 10 to 20 4K by12-bit peripheral processors which had a different set of challenges.  First of all, one didn’t have much space in which to store large programs, but could usually rely on the CPU’s seemingly limitless memory for program overlay storage.  Unfortunately, one of the prime dictums of diagnostic programming is to not use any part of the hardware until it has been tested first.  Therefore, if one was to test these peripheral processors first, the CPU’s memory would not have been tested yet and thus could not be relied on to store overlays.  Furthermore, upon system start-up, one could not rely on the peripheral processor’s ability to even do I/O (that is, read programs from card, tape, or disk) since it had not been tested yet, so the designer’s built an array of switches (which they called a Dead Start panel) on which either the start-up (or Boot) program could be installed or it could be used to test the very instructions that a system boot would rely on (for example, the all important I/O instructions).  Once the system boot instructions had been manually tested, the hardware engineer would then run a diagnostic that tested the peripheral processors many other (less than 64) instructions.  Since the display program could not be used to display error results because all of the peripheral processors instructions it would use had not been tested yet, this initial diagnostic simply came to a “halt” when an error was detected.   Oops, these systems had no halt instruction, so a “halt” was nothing but a jump instruction that looped on itself (obviously, that had been tested previously).  So in order to find out what the failure was, the hardware engineer was required to use an oscilloscope to read the address register and then refer to a program listing where he would find the instruction test sequence ending in that particular “halt” instruction.

My involvement with this start-up diagnostic came about when a new hardware generation of these super-computers was under development.  These second generation systems simplified reading the peripheral processor’s address registers by displaying there address information in bright red LEDs.  Hooray, now even I could see what the address was without the aide of an oscilloscope or hardware engineer.  This greatly improved my ability to enhance the start-up diagnostic so that it could be integrated into the maintenance operating system as the first program loaded thus streamlining testing these behemoth systems by assuring that the peripheral processors had been pre-tested.

As much as I enjoyed the challenges of that job, nothing lasts for ever.  Not even a computer company that at first tries to make microprocessors into terminals and consoles for its multiprocessing, multi-user supercomputers could withstand the onslaught of very cheap microcomputer systems (as compared to a multi-million dollar super-computer) that were being placed on everyone’s desk.  Eventually, the microcomputer industry advanced to where a single microcomputer could execute a multi-user operating system with terminals of its own and the super-computer industry began to collapse.  In the meantime, I moved on to my second career in integrating software and hardware for customers that also desired that SOVRAN should do their computer maintenance of all things.  Apparently, my previous employment had given me the tools to have an intuitive feel for the computer hardware maintenance game.

As time went by in my new vocation, I started to see some familiar things occurring in the microcomputer hardware I dealt with.  The first of these was found in the introduction of Intel’s Pentium Pro processor in 1995. I discovered that this microprocessor contained multiple functional units that allowed for the parallelization of programming instructions in a way that was very similar to that of the super-computers that I had worked on in the past (it also contained some enhancements to that architecture by virtue of the availability of excess on-chip real-estate that would have been prohibitive in a discretely transistorized mainframe super-computer).  This made that chip ideally suited for server applications that continued to put nails in the mainframe super-computer’s coffin.  It was so successful that it was further enhanced to become Intel’s line of XEON processor server microcomputer chips.  As I reflected on this in later years, I discovered that one of my former colleagues had hired on with Intel when he had left the super-computer foundry (Yes, there was a lot of steel in a super-computer mainframe). 

The feature that I eventually noticed about the microcomputer systems that I dealt with was that they included a read-only memory that also housed start-up diagnostics (you know, the programs that give you those ominous beep codes after you push the power button).  At the time, COMPAQ (now part of HP) was one of the hardware vendors that SOVRAN recommended, so I became very familiar with what they could do upon powering up.  Several years later, I attended a reunion with my former colleagues and was pleased to discover my former manager (go figure, I had been the one to train him into our old department) in attendance.  Rather than have to fire me (or anyone else for that matter) during an economic downturn, he chose to leave the super-computer company for employment at COMPAQ during one or our companies’ work-force reductions (I survived that one, but life was not nearly as fun after that!)  At any rate, I asked him if there was any relationship between the startup diagnostics that I had worked on and the implementation of a similar system on COMPAQ’s servers.  He replied laughingly that he, “probably had something to do with that.”

All of which is hopefully to demonstrate in my own small way that the desktop systems and servers we use today are vastly “larger” and more complicated than we realize because of the giant systems on whose shoulders they stand by virtue of continuing hardware and software development and innovation.  This complexity need not be of concern to anyone because the engineers and sale representatives of SOVRAN are available to assist us in the task of bringing state-of-the art hardware, software, and services to bear on the solutions to the complexities of today’s workplace.

Author: Sovran – Technology Solutions for Business -

As time progresses, server dynamics change and company business needs to be more dynamic then static when it comes to technology solutions. In order to communicate effectively, employees need to access data in order to fulfill their roles. A popular technology solution for small to medium sized organizations was the Small Business Server known as “SBS”. Unfortunately, SBS has recently been retired, leaving many organizations struggling to decide how to proceed into the next realm of supported technology.

With the retirement of SBS, Microsoft announced Windows Server 2012 as the replacement. With Windows Server 2012, the options have been slimmed down to bare essentials in reflection to the old SBS feature set.

The “Foundation” solution offers basic support features such as file serving and print sharing, but is limited to availability on new servers created by Original Equipment Manufactures ( OEMs). If you want to utilize this version, you’re going to have to buy a new server. This will be a good starting point if you are implementing a new infrastructure and have less than 15 users in your environment. 

Another version for SBS customers is called “Essentials”. This particular version was targeted for users of SBS who wish to maintain their environment of 25 or fewer users. Microsoft has been pushing cloud solutions such as Office 365 and the cloud version of Sharepoint to accommodate existing SBS customers. The Essentials package comes with Client Backup and Remote Web Access which have been brought forward from SBS and Home Server. Essentials can also integrate with an onsite Exchange 2010 server but will require a separate server license.

It’s now the responsibility of the small and medium business technologists to determine which features they will need to license in order to maintain in-house solutions ( or cloud services ) without the convenient consolidation of features that SBS solved.

Written by: Jon Peters, Systems Engineer

Author: Sovran – Technology Solutions for Business -