A new generation of software runs best on a new generation of hardware. 2007 is a great year for you to choose to upgrade both. The new technologies can certainly improve your productivity and the quality of your technology life.

Most businesses I visit have hardware issues that need attention and correction. Your firm, regardless of size, is probably no exception. Qualified internal IT personnel as well as outsourced vendors frequently make incorrect recommendations based on their level of knowledge or perception that the firm won't spend the money to do things right. This year is an excellent time to prepare your network infrastructure for the future while giving you more flexibility and reliability in day to day operations. When your infrastructure is right, you also have greater productivity, team member satisfaction, and easier disaster recovery.

My hope is that you can use the following as a checklist to see how your technology infrastructure measures up to current and reasonable standards. If you are a smaller business, you will still need most everything listed. The items underlined are specifically for businesses of 50 or more people, but you will notice very few items underlined. Additionally, my team maintains a list of specific part number recommendations at http://www.nmgi.com/. Look for technology recommendations on our site. Since many of you are creating budgets and scheduling your upgrades of the year now, I have tried to prepare a simple list of key technologies. Building from the outside communications towards servers and then workstations, here are our best suggestions for the properly IT technology:

1) Protection 

a. Surge protection - every item that touches your network should be plugged through a surge protector. Common items missed include copiers, printers, scanners, and monitors. Key vendor: APC

b. UPS - all servers should have UPS protection. You may want to consider having UPS protection on desktops if you have frequent power outages. Key vendor: Liebert

c. Backup - traditionally associated with servers, most backup now involves removable disks, network attached storage (NAS), and off-site Internet backup. There are still applications where tape makes sense. Key vendors: High-Rely and eFolderbackup.

d. Continuous Data Protection (CDP) - this technology can back up servers in real time, replicate the data to another site or your home and from there can be duplicated to an Internet backup site. Sometimes the CDP is part of your firewall, but most often today, it is purchased as a separate appliance.

e. Generator - if you are in an area where you have extended power outages, there are full building generators that can provide enough power for your entire network. Minimally consider extended power for your servers and machine room's air conditioning.

2) Network

a. Two or more high speed communication lines - Even small businesses can justify having two or more lines to the outside world; particularly with our dependence on Internet web access, email and remote access. Make sure if you spend money on multiple lines, that there are different upstream providers, for example cable modem and DSL or MPLS and wireless, Frame Relay and cellular, etc. Additionally, have technicians configure your firewall to use the extra bandwidth all of the time and have automatic failover installed.

b. Load balancing firewall - frequently we see residential grade firewalls (Linksys, Dlink, NetGear) instead of commercial grade firewalls (SonicWALL, WatchGuard, Cisco). You should be particularly concerned about this protection for your business.

c. SSL-VPN capability - Secure Socket Layer Virtual Private Networks allow connection to your network using the commonly open browser port 80 keeping your team from being cut off from your office by other people's firewalls. If you want your team to securely access your network from home, clients or on the road, you should consider this technology. For some firewalls, it can be added as a software feature, for others, it is a separately purchased and maintained piece of hardware.

d. Commercial grade power over Ethernet (POE), segmenting, Virtual LAN (VLAN) switch - This sounds like a mouthful, but today's switches need some features that you may not have purchased in the past.

i. POE - this feature supports Voice over IP (VOIP) phones and allows you to provide power to the phone handset, security cameras, and wireless access points

ii. VLAN - Even for small networks, the ability to segment users of different departments or volumes of data can be easily accomplished with today's VLAN switches.

iii. Commercial grade - like firewalls, we often see products that are sub-standard deployed in mission critical positions. Many of the products are home grade, and even units that pretend to be business ready don't have enough speed to handle the loads of busy networks. Suspect names include LinkSys, Dell, and DLink. Switches without enough capacity are silent bottlenecks in your network. Key Vendors: HP, Cisco

e. Certified CAT 6a cable - the certification reports should be kept on file. We generally don't recommend that you replace old network cables unless:

i. Your existing cables are not certified, and a small test shows they won't certify easily.

ii. You intend to stay in your office for at least two years.

iii. You intend to run gigabit network speeds. CAT 6 cable is really the minimum cable that should be used for 1GB networks, and 1GB is our standard recommendation for servers and workstations connection speed today. Watch for new standards such as CAT 6f or CAT 7 that is intended to support 10GB networks. You can use CAT 5 and 5E cable that is certified, but you will again have a silent bottleneck on performance.

f. Wireless Access Points - need to have the following capabilities. They should

i. Support the new N technology as soon as it is approved as a standard. We are discontinuing our prior recommendations for 802.11 b/a/g wireless technologies because of the new N standard.

ii. Be able to be configured for both private access inside the firewall and public access outside the firewall.

iii. Be firmware upgradeable - security flaws are frequently found and need fixed.

3) Servers

a. Blade or Rack servers - Businesses of any size at all should be using rack mount servers for more reliability and the ability to repair more quickly instead of tower server configurations. However, there is a new generation of server technologies that has been introduced by IBM, HP and Sun called blade servers. The enclosures accommodate many physical CPUs, drives and network cards in a single cabinet. Small businesses can now justify owning blade servers, and will find performance, reliability and cost justifications for using this approach.

b. Storage

i. DASD RAID V - Direct Attached Storage Disks still are very popular, and the minimum configuration we like to recommend includes a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) controller with ample onboard cache. RAID requires a minimum of three disks to play, and we actually prefer an additional hot spare drive in the array at all times as well. The only time we recommend a mirrored pair of drives in a server is when 1) the server is attached to a SAN or 2) the server has a special purpose like terminal services with no significant data stored locally.

ii. SAN - Storage Area Networks are very common in large businesses. The cost has continued to drop enough that smaller and smaller businesses can afford the technology. Expect SANs to arrive in blade enclosures to make them even more affordable for smaller businesses. Additionally new technologies like iSCSI and IP SANs are reducing costs over traditional Fiber Channel technologies.

iii. NAS - Network Attached Storage is an inexpensive way to share a fairly large capacity of disk. Many of these units are slower, and should only be used for backup or intermittently used files, not for day to day operations.

c. Virtualization - your IT team should be looking at converting your physical servers to virtual servers. This technology is working excellently to reduce costs, improve reliability and speed up server deployments. We expect even the smallest businesses to use virtualized servers over the next few years. Virtualization for both servers and desktops is such an important topic, that we will cover it in more detail in the future.

4) Workstation

a. Desktop

i. Dual-core or Quad-core 64 bit processors

ii. 2.00 GHz 4MB L2 Cache, 1333 MHz FSB

iii. 2-4GB DDR2-667 ECC FBD RAM

iv. NVIDIA Graphics Card 256-512MB On Board PCIe

v. Integrated 4-channel SATA 3Gb/s controller with 150 - 750GB 7200 or 10,000 SATA RPM Fixed Disks OR optionally a 300GB 10K SCSI (SAS) drive as a backup add-on

vi. DVD/CD RW+/- Dual Layer (HDDVD/Blu-Ray add $400)

vii. 10/100/1000 Gigabit NIC (Wireless Option 802.11a/b/g/n)

viii. Bluetooth, 54-1 Multimedia Flash Reader

ix. Front and rear USB 2.0, Firewire, Dolby 7.1 Surround Sound

x. Dual Monitor Connections DVI and/or VGA

b. Laptop - the desktop replacement

i. Size

1. 17" laptops weight in at 8+ pounds

2. 13" - 15" traditional laptops

3. Portable, Ultra Portable, Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC)

ii. Processor

1. Intel® Core ^TM 2 DUO Options

a. T5200 - T7200 (higher the number, faster the processor)

b. Faster the processor, the hotter the system runs

c. Gamers and heavy video users, the faster the better

d. Tops out around 2.3GHZ with double clocking (hotter still!)

2. AMD ® Turion ^TM 64 X2 Options

a. T50 - T60 (higher the number, faster the processor)

b. Same caveats as above; faster = hotter

c. Runs Vista in Native 64 or 32 emulation

d. Most programs will have to run in emulation, so plan accordingly for business use.

iii. Graphics

1. Look for on-Board Graphics Memory versus Shared Memory

2. On-Board Memory is better, but more expensive and hotter

3. 128MB On-Board Minimum - 256BM, 512MB better & hotter

4. NVIDIA and ATI (AMD) Major players

iv. Widescreens the standard

v. Watch for DVI versus VGA External Monitor Port

vi. 2GB of RAM for Vista Business & Ultimate

vii. Blu-Ray/HD/DVD RW+ Drives

viii. 74 - 160GB SATA Fixed Disk

ix. Flash Drives may be an option instead of fixed disk

x. Bluetooth (option on many brands)

xi. a/b/g/n Wireless Adaptor

xii. 10/100/1000 NIC

xiii. No less than 2 USB and 4 is preferred - look for side-by-side, not over-under

xiv. ExpressCard instead of PCCard

c. Monitors

i. 19-21" OK

ii. 22-24" better, and quite affordable

iii. Consider monitors that rotate to a vertical position (portrait vs. landscape)

5) Input/Output

a. Production quality scanners - Fujitsu and Canon are the key vendors

b. Color Laser - Multi-function Device (MFD) worthwhile to obtain fax, backup scanning and other paper handling. Clearly HP is the winner in this category.

c. Multi-function copier - stay with the big brands like Xerox and Canon. Attach to your network, but only use scan capability for backup purposes.

d. Monochrome laser - Go for very fast, network attached with duplex capability. HP is clearly the winner in this category, so watch for the DN designations (D=Duplex, N=Network).

6) Other items to consider to complete the picture

a. IP enabled security cameras - Linksys and Sony are good choices here

b. Voice over IP phone systems - Like virtualization, deserves a whole future article by itself. Key Vendors: Cisco, ShoreTel, Avaya and InterTel.

c. Software

i. Microsoft Technologies - Windows Server 2003, SQL Server 2005, Exchange 2007, SharePoint 2007, Citrix or Terminal Server OR Windows Small Business Server with Citrix or Terminal Server along with Microsoft Office 2007

ii. Virtualization - VMWare ESX server or MS Virtual Server

iii. Anti-virus suite - CA eTrust, McAfee

iv. Spam control - DoubleCheck

d. Cellular data connection - Sprint, Verizon, AT&T

e. PDA - Blackberry, Treo, Samsung BlackJack

Each of these items could easily take hours to explain, and I understand you may not have as much detail as you would like. However, my chief concerns are that you are 1) buying sub-standard products to achieve false economy or because of lack of knowledge, 2) selecting a solution in every category where you have a need, 3) that you are preparing your network infrastructure for the major overhaul to come when you transition to Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista and Office 2007. Other applications could add additional requirements to your infrastructure. We encourage you to use the cookbook above to minimize your risk while doing the most to improve your technology life.

Randy Johnston
Executive Vice President of K2 Enterprises