Why has nothing happened to noticeboards?

We have all stood reading noticeboards, at school, university, hospital, doctors, at work and always with ripped posters that have not been changed for months and sometimes years, information that is so out of date, no one with the responsibility to maintain it or in most cases the time.

But if you had a library of health and safety posters, environmental posters and dynamic content such as current weather and travel information wouldn’t that be better? With new content created and available in minutes, even animated or video content rather than static images or text.

Imagine how you could keep employees informed of their business and involve them, distribute information to visitors or customers, even advertise local services!

This can all be done with the complete end-to-end solution of monitors or freestanding displays, wired or wireless connection, central content management and content creation.

The end of traditional backup to tape?

We are all familiar with the need to backup our data with many organisations spending a fortune on software and tape to protect data through backup processes, commonly run at night and protecting specific files and directories, plus databases and email repositories.

A new option is through continual data protector (CDP) using an appliance on each site with local disk storage the solution takes complete disk snapshots of protected servers,desktops or laptops, these are incremental by byte and are then replicated to another site. If you do not have a second site an alternative is a cloud based Disaster Recovery (DR) service maintaining copies of the snapshots for retrieval in the event of a failure.

The data can be recovered when required this could be a single file, a directory or a complete system, with the ability to recover to a new server or virtual machine within 15 minutes, a complete site in around 45 minutes. This will make traditional backup redundant, but is the organisation requires backup to be done the CDP appliance and local client will intercept the backup process and mount a snapshot as a source for the backup taking the need to quiesce services and having no performance impact on the server being backed up.

If you would like further information go to our website

A step in the right direction!

We are due to have a new service available from BT Wholesale with many exchanges enabled now and majority by the end of next year.  Fibre to the Cab (FttC) or sometimes Fibre to the Curb is now in general roll out by BT Openreach.

The service offers 40Mb download with options of 2Mb or 10Mb upload, with 15Mb and 20Mb options in the future.  The service does not have the traditional contention based capacity management but a guaranteed minimum throughput with the standard being 8Mb and enhanced offering 12Mb.

The service is VDSL based with a VDSL box being supplied and fitted as a part of the installation, this VDSL circuit then connects the premises to the local telephone cab via copper and from the cab to the exchange by fibre.  This provides a number of benefits, the first being the distance the signal is carried over copper being as short as possible, the use of VDSL increasing the performance on the circuit and finally an increase in the SLA for fix from the current 5 day or 24 hours to an new enhanced 7 hour fix.

The service is available in many areas and we are actively provisioning services for customers now contact us on 0121 2700370 for more information or email sales@sdvv.co.uk

Were will all this virtualisation go?

We have all sent the rise of virtualisation in both the Linux and Windows environments, we try to get the most utilisation from the smallest footprint of servers, reducing hardware costs, power and management overhead. As the density of servers grows and the data usage for the servers and the storage infrastructure increases we are moving from two to four to six and maybe eight NICs per server with separate LAN and SAN/NAS gigabit or 10 gigabit switches.

A new area is the virtualization of the I/O infrastructure, Virtensys provide an alternative to the switches cables and NICs by using a virtual LAN and storage solution with a PCI-E card providing 40Gb of throughput to a top of rack appliance. This provides a high performance and cost effective alternative, with a clear path for future development.

WiFi control and analysis now achievable at a more granular level

Meraki recently introduced application level analysis for their cloud controller based wifi network solutions, this gives real layer 7 understanding of what wireless clients are doing on the network, couple this with the new application level filtering and prioritisation and you have a very powerful way to manage your enterprise class wireless networks.

You can understand exactly what applications are in use, prioritise business specific applications and even block applications such as peer to peer file sharing on you wireless networks all via a central cloud based controller, with new application specific protocols identified as they are introduced.

Take a further look on SD Voice & Video Website or Meraki Website

This is an alternative and exciting way to build and operate wireless networks!

WiFi simplified!

Setting up and operating a public or private wifi solution can be a nightmare, manually configuring multiple access points getting them play well together as a team and controlling access to local LAN and the Internet via controllers.

That is the past welcome to the future Meraki! With Meraki’s wireless access point you just power them up and give them Internet access and you are nearly there just setup a network name, tell it how to secure access and whether the network has LAN or only Internet access and it is up and running automatically across multiple access points.

Need to bill for access? Just select a payment plan and it is ready without even a payment gateway, need to block adult content a simple selection and it is sorted.

The best thing though is complete control and monitoring afterwards from the wen based central cloud controller!

If you would like more information contact sales@sdvv.co.uk

Travel restrictions cause havoc to holidaymakers and businesses

With many thousands of European holidaymakers and business people stranded, with the prospect of further disruption for the foreseeable future, businesses need to take a fresh look at how they do business.

The use of high definition video conferencing will make a great impact on businesses who need to continue to collaborate with customers, suppliers or other parts of their business around the world, without the Icelandic volcano effecting their business.

SD Voice & Video can give you a better understanding of how it could improve your communications and what would be the most appropriate solution to your needs. Click here for more information.