New Horizons Twin Cities representatives Maria Mamalakis and Brian Szymanski greet attendees at the ALAMN Expo

Sovran and New Horizons Computer Learning Centers Twin Cities were active participants in the 22^nd Annual Educational Conference and Exposition of ALAMN, the Minnesota Chapter of the Association of Legal Administrators, which took place at the Minneapolis Convention Center on Tuesday, February 14, 2012. The goal of the event is to provide an opportunity for information exchange between administrators, legal staff, attorneys, industry leaders and business partner sponsors.

The theme of this year’s ALAMN event was “Are You Fit to Lead?” Sovran displayed new concepts in unified communication and thin client solutions in order to help leaders keep their information technology operating lean, green and at optimal performance.

New Horizons Computer Learning Centers Twin Cities offered leaders the opportunity to explore new business application and technology and IT certification training. New Horizons accommodates a variety of learning styles by offering multiple training modalities including instructor led training, mentored learning, online live and online anytime courses.

The event concluded with a reception and grand prize drawing. Sovran awarded a lucky recipient an iPad and New Horizons awarded a Kindle Fire.

Benjamin Jensen, Gena Petrella and Damon Edstrom represented Sovran at the ALAMN Expo

Author: Sovran – Technology Solutions for Business -

In past articles, we have introduced Nimble Storage, SAN appliances built to eliminate the compromise among performance, capacity, ease of use, and price.    As IT infrastructures evolve to include more centralized services such as mobility, terminal services/RDS or virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), the need for higher input / output performance (IOPS) has increased.   With legacy SAN architectures, the need for more IOPS is met with more shelves of disks.    In many cases, this results in provisioning two to three times the capacity in disk space just to get the IOPS needed to support the end user transactions.   Nimble’s patented Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout (CASL™) is the first storage architecture designed from the ground up to seamlessly integrate SSDs with high-capacity disks, delivering affordable performance, integrated backup and disaster recovery, and pain-free operations.

Nimble Storage has recently been listed on the VMware vSphere Hardware Compatibility List (HCL). VMware vSphere is the industry’s most complete, scalable and powerful virtualization platform, delivering infrastructure and application services that organizations need to transform their information technology and deliver it as a service.  Inclusion in VMware’s HCL certifies that Nimble Storage will function seamlessly with vSphere, thus providing customers with the following benefits.
•A converged storage/backup solution that is consolidated and optimized with products from the world’s leading virtualization company

•A SAN for virtualized infrastructure that has been proven, extensively tested and is jointly supported

•Measureable (and noticeable) improvement in the operations of core server and virtual desktop resources, enabling greater end user productivity.

If mobility, thin client /VDI of just SAN replacement initiatives are on your horizon in 2012, let us help you with your infrastructure planning.    We can walk you through a review of current SAN technologies help you determine selection through metrics based on your current and planned future services to be delivered to your end users.    Chances are, a Nimble Storage SAN will be prove to be a very cost effective storage solution for your environment.

Author: Sovran – Technology Solutions for Business -

Students consistently remark about the value they receive from the classes at New Horizons. They are pleased with how quickly they can put their newly acquired skills to use.  At New Horizons, we are always excited to hear from students who enjoy their experience with us. We believe there are many more people who would benefit if they knew how easy it could be to learn through our unique approach to computer education. The people who take courses and learn through New Horizons hands-on training are able to advance their careers, land higher-paying jobs and make better use of the tools and technologies available to them. We want to make certain that as many people as possible have the chance to experience, for themselves, how quickly they can be on the road to better performance and brighter career prospects. For a limited time, we are offering a special Buy-One-Get-One-Free certificate (value of $250.00) when you and a friend enroll in one of our Instructor-led or Mentored application courses. However, we have only a limited amount of Bring-a-Friend certificates available. If someone you know shares your interest in computing and is excited about enhancing their knowledge and career opportunities through training, ask them to join you for a course at New Horizons.  Contact sales@nhtwincities.com for a complete description of course options and ask to register through “Bring-a-Friend” BOGO program.
Written by: Linda Ruhland, Marketing Communications Manager

Author: Sovran – Technology Solutions for Business -

As email continues to be a business critical application in today’s marketplace, the desire for a business to have a secure and reliable platform for email has never been more important. Since the introduction of Exchange 2007, and more recently of Exchange 2010, this goal can be accomplished with significantly less complexity and cost.

While Exchange as a messaging platform continues to provide a robust enterprise messaging experience, many people are unaware of some of the features that are now provided to enhance security and reliability. These include Database Availability Groups, independent user policies for ActiveSync, OWA and Outlook Anywhere, and email retention policies.

Database Availability Groups, or DAGs for short are a culmination of many years of clustering provided within Exchange. In the past, systems would be required to be created in expensive clusters where databases would be duplicated to both systems. These systems worked fairly well but for most organizations, it was too expensive to implement as they required duplicate hardware and storage space to provide redundancy for mailbox databases. With the inclusion of DAGs in Exchange 2010, and the ability to virtualize Exchange a DAG can be created as two virtual machines across different physical locations. This allows administrators to not only chose which mailbox databases will be replicated, and to where, but also to provide a level of disaster recovery in the event the one of the sites becomes unavailable.

Independent user policies for ActiveSync, Outlook Web Access (OWA) and Outlook Anywhere, really provide the organization to control access to company resources on or external to their equipment.  By forcing security polices such as enforced passwords on mobile devices, organizations can be sure that company data that is accessed on non-company resources including smartphones can be secured.

Finally, email retention policies provide an organization of a way to control the amount of data stored in the messaging system. Currently, many organizations provide a cap on the amount of data a user can keep in their mailbox to a fixed amount. By implementing retention policies an organization can force a sort of “recycling” system that moves messages to and from folders at predetermined time intervals. This works well when policies are put in place to clean out the deleted items folder after a year or the sent items folder after a specified period.  This greatly decreases the amount of email retained within the system and speeds up performance of Outlook for the users.
Implementing these features as well as many others included within Exchange can greatly increase the reliability and security of your enterprise messaging platform as we continue to rely on email as a day to day business critical application.
Written by: Grant Becker, Systems Engineer

Author: Sovran – Technology Solutions for Business -

As I began High School, I discovered an interest in reading, which was naturally spurred on by my English teacher (I think he had a vested interest).  In addition to the limited number of volumes in the school library, we had access to a national mail-order paper-pack bookseller called the “TeenAge Book Club” (Obviously the forerunner of Amazon in antiquity).  This allowed me to explore various genres, but I quickly found an interest in Science Fiction (SF) which has stayed with me to this day.
Several of the features of SF literature that I enjoy are the concepts of outer-space and time travel.  It would seem that a large space ship would be required to travel to other habitable worlds at outstanding, if not excessive, speeds. (Note: one would have to survive the transit of a vast amount of space and have the ability to attain zero velocity upon arrival.)  As for time travel, the Laws of Physics dictate that time slows down as one’s speed increases, thus hinting that we could possibly travel back in time as our vast spaceship travels to our favorite star.  As for traveling forward in time, we’ve already mastered that. (the only issue is that the speed is fixed!)

While not predicted by the world of Science Fiction, the progress of computer technology also deals with the concepts of “space” (capacity) and “time” (speed).  Obviously and historically, the emphasis of the computer industry has been to increase speed as if there were no limits and increase storage capacity to meet the demands for data availability and preservation.  It’s as if we were building “temples” for our data in which bigger and faster would be better. 
Now, obviously, there are limits to the size of our “temples” and, among others, the most severe limitation is the financial one.  As our systems have grown faster and larger, they have exceeded the requirements of most small businesses and even some medium-sized businesses.  With today’s high-speed multi-core systems, it’s like getting a small business data center all in one box.  The end result is that it has more computing “capacity” than is necessary for the average older system that it replaces.  On the other hand, if one implements a virtualization environment (such as VMware) on it, the small business’s whole data center (that is, multiple computer systems) will now reside on a single box, thus reducing the “energy footprint” which has implications for the environment and the company’s computing life-cycle energy expenses.
Except for the recent hard drive shortage due to flood in Thailand, the prices of hard drives have come down to the point that one is able to afford the arrays of hard drives required to implement storage systems (called Storage Area Networks or SANs) accessible from several computers simultaneously.  This is important in a server environment for it allows us to implement redundancy to our virtual system. The failure of any one computer does not prevent us from accessing our data, or even performing further processing on it. 
There are other benefits to a SAN’s large capacity as well.  With the proper software (or even firmware), backups of our data can be created as a separate instance on the same SAN.  Now this might sound wasteful because of data being duplicated, but some storage systems also have the capability to eliminate the duplication by storing only the changes to the original files as the backup.  This is known as “de-duplication”.
So, if you have the “need for speed” or are just running out of storage capacity and are not averse to reducing your energy expenses, contact your friendly Sovran Engineers and Sales Representatives for details concerning system changes and upgrades that are designed to meet you goals.

Written by: Harley Stauffer, Systems Engineer

Author: Sovran – Technology Solutions for Business -

New Horizons Twin Cities Course Offerings

Author: Sovran – Technology Solutions for Business -

Over the past 4 articles on Office 365 we have focused on the products, pricing, functionality, and the path to the cloud. In this the final of 5 articles, we will focus on another product that although right now is a separate part of the suite, it is equally important for our customers to consider in their own journey to the cloud.

Microsoft Intune is a new cloud based offering that enables administrators the ability to secure PC’s from virus threats with endpoint protection as well as many other security tasks. The administrator will receive alerts on any threats to their network while also being able to customize security and firewall settings on each PC as a whole or individually without having to visit the PC in person. One of the most enticing features of the product is how administrators can now easily manage their PC’s from a central web-based console where ever they are, and when ever they want while also being able to support mobile clients. As many administrators know with a traditional on-premise solution managing remote machines is a huge pain, as most times these machines are not able to be configured until they are back on the network which opens many security gaps that we are always concerned about. The most popular functionality is the ability to not only manage these on the move machines, but to also provide remote assistance to the remote workers any time of the day. Every administrator is well aware that deploying applications to machines can be a very expensive and a complicated process, but with Microsoft Intune and its cloud based functionality deploying Microsoft and 3^rd party applications, it is not only cost effective with this product but also very easy to do. Another expensive experience is installing, configuring, and managing a monitoring system of your network and Intune has the answer. Intune monitors the heath of all machines on your network and provides trend analysis of the machines which enables the administrator to not only be aware of bad behavior but remotely repair bad behaving endpoints. Clear, concise, and accurate reporting on the heath of the machines is always important but with Intune, you are also able to generate a report of the complete hardware and software inventory in your organization. Often overlooked by administrators when troubleshooting machines is hardware and software configurations, with the reporting out of the box with Intune, we are able to better grasp what could be the core issues.

Lastly with Microsoft Intune, all your machines automatically are eligible to receive upgrade right to the latest and greatest Microsoft operating system! That’s correct every time a new OS is released you now can upgrade every machine on your network to the latest OS ensuring software compliance across the entire organization as well as the utilization of the most secure and robust Microsoft platform available. In essence you will not have to purchase Windows OS licensing for any hardware that is on the Intune Platform now or in the future. So you might ask this all sounds great but how much? Well, we are very pleased to let you know that it will only cost $11 per user, per month for all of the above! Hard to beat that price point and if you would like to see a production demo we can facilitate a demo anytime. Even better, if you would like to set up a trial in your environment, Sovran can also set this up for you for 30 days free and please contact your Sales Consultant.

Written by: Patrick Gibson, Vice President of Sales and Marketing

Author: Sovran – Technology Solutions for Business -

InterCall has partnered with Sovran and Microsoft to deliver Microsoft Office 365 with integrated audio conferencing as part of Lync Online, improving meeting experiences with enhanced call controls and increased flexibility….More

Why InterCall for Office 365 & Lync Online?

Enhanced Features
Enable external participants to join meetings
Connect on Multiple devices
Call scheduling via Outlook
Dial-in and dial-out
Mute/unlock
End conference
VoIP/PSTN integration, including mixed recording
*0 in-call support

Global Support

You don’t become the world’s leading conferencing service provider (Wainhouse Research 2011) based on features alone. InterCall also offers 24/7 global support with certified agents skilled in all aspects of Lync Online. Enhanced tier 1 and 2 support is provided to our Lync Online and Office 365 customers.

As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, there is no provider in the industry better suited to meet your conferencing and collaboration needs.

Contact your Sovran representative today to sign-up for an InterCall Reservationless-Plus conferencing account today!

Author: Sovran – Technology Solutions for Business -

Managed Services – 90 Day Trial Trial Offer for 90 Days to Ensure Satisfaction in Our Service At Sovran, we make the decision to choose a new technology services provider an easy one. We are so confident that we would like to offer you a 90 day period to evaluate our service without any obligation to continue beyond that 90 day period if you are not 100% satisfied. In the event you are not completely satisfied with our service during the first 90 days of service, you can terminate your Managed Services agreement by providing us with a written cancellation notice any time during that 90 day period. No Obligation Notice of termination must be received by Sovran no later than 90 days after our agreement is effective. If you cancel during this 90 day period, you will only be responsible for the standard first three months contracted service charges, along with any extra time and material work provided at your request.

Author: Sovran – Technology Solutions for Business -

The Cisco Cius is a new tablet developed by Cisco to streamline workplace productivity in a borderless network. The features of the Cius allows one to fully harness the power of both their public and private clouds with full office phone integration, thin client capabilities and all the power of Google’s Android operating system.

The Cius can earn a place in the office as a fully integrated thin client and phone combination with Cisco’s docking station. The Cius’s docking station is complete with USB ports, display ports and a handheld phone. Need to leave quickly? Not a problem, just pick up the Cius and you’re able to bring your entire desktop operating system with you with VMware’s VMware View Android Application.

The device also allows for more face time with the ability to make video calls with other capable devices. All that you do is dial the other device’s extension and the Cius will automatically detect this capability and start the video option. Another useful meeting feature is the fully integrated WebEx application developed by Cisco that comes preinstalled on the device. To join a meeting, simply look in the calendar of the WebEx application and touch the meeting you want to join, which launches the event. Taking Cius’s capabilities a step further, you can also host meetings if you currently have a Meeting Center Subscription. In addition, you can share content by passing the presenter control to the virtual desktop session that is currently active on the tablet.

Another practical use of the Cius is the ability to tether your phone or use a 4G hotspot to connect to the device using the Cisco AnyConnect VPN application. You can go anywhere you get a signal; if you’re on your desk phone there’s no reason to pause the call, even if you are leaving the building. All of these technologies work together to create a seamless experience for the user, thus breaking down the barriers the might otherwise experience.

Written by: Damon Edstrom, Systems Engineer

Author: Sovran – Technology Solutions for Business -