An interruption to your business doesn’t have to be catastrophic to cause a loss of revenue. Even a power outage can have its consequences. Hitches and hiccups have to be planned for because, when they happen, valuable time is spent finding and fixing the problem. Don’t underestimate the expense of downtime—idle employees and diminished service to customers are high costs. Take a boy scout’s advice, and be prepared.
There are a variety of approaches to business continuance and the one you choose will depend on the size of your company, the type of business you run, and what functions you deem to be essential. The safest solution, if you absolutely can’t afford downtime, might be a fully redundant data center that you can switch to during an interruption. This offers high availability and can practically negate the effects of most hiccups. Smaller businesses, however, often require a more cost-effective answer. To [...]

The phrase, “I wish I had access to that data!” is never a good sign. It might be the final nail in the coffin of a missed opportunity, the lament following a lost sale, or a blow to out-of-office productivity. But there is a solution! Summit Technology helps businesses to establish a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, a form of virtualization that is ideal for remote sales teams and branch offices. It can ensure that they have access to data and applications when they need them, instead of just wishful thinking!
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) refers to the process of employing virtual machines (VMs) to run desktop operating systems and applications. The VMs are centralized on servers in the data center, which allows them to be upgraded, patched, secured, and maintained efficiently and conveniently. Employees are then able to directly access the VMs from existing PCs or from thin clients, even when they’re [...]

Schools, hospitals, hotels, and office buildings all have fire escape plans or emergency exit contingencies. The routes are posted in almost every room, signs caution against using elevators, and smoke detectors are placed to give the most possible warning. Fire drills are conducted regularly to ensure everyone knows where to go and what to do in an emergency. Countless lives have been saved because of these guidelines.
Savvy business leaders and IT professionals know that a disaster can endanger an entire company. Researchers at the University of Texas indicate that, following a calamitous loss of data, 43% of businesses don’t even reopen, 51% shut down within two years, and only 6% survive beyond that. Those are convincing numbers. Is your enterprise willing to gamble on that? If not, then it’s crucial to have a disaster recovery plan in place.
Some small businesses think that “disaster recovery” is just a matter of making [...]

Whether it’s a brand new Ferrari convertible or a 15-year old station wagon, there are two primary ways to maintain your vehicle. You can follow the recommended schedule of oil changes, tune ups, and tire rotations to keep it at peak performance, or you can drive it until it breaks down on the side of the road and have it towed to the shop. The same is true of your computer network. Will you choose the small costs of computer health maintenance, or the price tags and inconvenience of emergency-based service?
If you’re still reading, you probably selected the first option. Summit Technology offers a variety of services and solutions to keep your computers running smoothly, but today we’ll focus on PlateSpin Protect. PlateSpin defends your workloads, both physical and virtual, through live incremental replication, a process that reduces network usage by recognizing and replicating updates, instead of entire databases. There [...]

In 1982, the movie Tron imagined an entire virtual world that existed within our computers. Objects and people could be digitized and sent into this fantastical world of data and energy where computer processes had a form and life of their own. Twenty-nine years later, we may not be able to virtualize ourselves into the computer, but we can virtualize our computers into other computers. Let me clarify: with virtualization, it’s possible to run multiple “computers” (called Virtual Machines or VM’s) off of the same physical hardware and resources, but keep them isolated from a security standpoint. The virtualization technology can boost your server performance from 10% to 70%. It’s all about consolidation and efficiency.
Virtualization can cut your hardware and operating costs by an impressive 50%, but it doesn’t stop there. It can reduce your associated energy expenses by 80%. That’s a huge step in the movement towards greener business [...]

CRASH! BANG! ZOOM! VoIP! …One of these things is not like the others. Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, is a fancy term for a technical process that provides a simple (for you) service: telephone calls through the internet. You may have already used it in the form of Skype. Essentially, a VoIP program digitizes your voice and breaks it up into packets, which are transmitted over a data network (rather than a voice network) and then reassembled. The data network makes it possible to send video or other media simultaneously, expanding the possibilities of what you can achieve with a call.
A major reason that businesses are switching to VoIP is the savings, and Summit Technology wants to help you save, too! Because VoIP technology bypasses the traditional phone network, you can bypass the traditional costs associated with voice plans, thus relocating and consolidating your expenses. VoIP also makes telecommuting [...]

Here’s a phrase you may have heard bandied about: cloud computing. It sounds like it’s straight out of science fiction, but don’t worry! It’s no smoke monster. In fact, it can bring you both convenience and savings. Without cloud, servers crowd! But with it, you can consolidate to fewer machines and centralize your processes and storage. This creates flexibility for your business and breathing room for your IT department. No more juggling flash drives or transferring hefty files when you want to take your work with you: remote access becomes a reality when you connect to the cloud from your phone, laptop, or tablet.
Hand in hand with cloud computing is virtualization. If you’ve ever seen someone run Windows on a Mac computer, or OS X on a PC, then you’ve already witnessed virtualization. Those computers are using a virtual model, or emulation, of the real thing and can run the [...]

If you were to make a list of the preventative health measures you take, it would probably include the following: diet, exercise, health screenings and checkups, brushing your teeth, and applying suntan lotion. But how often do you (figuratively) brush your computer’s teeth? You’re proactive about your own health and you can be proactive about your computer’s, too. Don’t risk an ill-timed crash or malady! Technology seems to abide by Murphy’s Law: if it can go wrong, it will go wrong (usually at the worst possible moment). A lot of grief can be avoided with the right preventative IT measures, so if you want a healthy, happy computer, then Summit Technology is the doctor for you!
Be on guard against external threats to your computer’s well-being. No doubt you’ve received countless warnings about suspicious e-mails, Trojans, worms, and Nigerian princesses. External threats receive the most publicity and can be enormous in [...]

VMWare currently has the best VDI experience with their Pcoip technology.   A windows client is readily available but not a linux client.
VMWare does sponsor the openview client OSS project, but it does not have support for pcoip (only rdp).  So thats not a good option.
Fortunately there is a completely unsupported workaround! VMware does provide linux based clients to their thinclient partners and several of them have these downloads available.
These steps have been tested on Opensuse 11.4 (HP's downloads are deb based)
First:  Go to HP'ssupport and  download section for their T5565 thin client.  Here is the current link but this could change (google will find the latest link for you): http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareIndex.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodNameId=4306249&prodTypeId=12454&prodSeriesId=4306187&swLang=13&taskId=135&swEnvOID=4030
Second:  Download the "Thinpro Add-on Vmware view broker".  Current version is 4.6
Third: Download the "Thinpro Add-on Broker Update".  This has several dependencies you might need.
Now you can use a windows workstation or use wine to extract the exe's you just downloaded.  [...]

I've been running Opensuse 11.4 Beta fro some time now and needed to get the Novell client for Linux up and running.
Surprisingly it worked fairly well with only a few minor modifications.
Step 1: Download binutils-2.19-9.3-*.rpm
Step 2: Do NOT install the binutil. Instead open the rpm in your favorite zip program and extract the libbfd-2.19.so to your /usr/lib64 (/usr/lib for 32 bit users)
Step 3: Download NCL 2.0 SP2
Step 4: Mount the ISO and run the "ncl_install install" command
Step 5: Accept any warning about the missing libbfd requirement. You can just accept the option to "break" the rpm and install anyways.
That should be it! The only issue I still encounter is a message of "User.OU" is not a user object.
To get around this enter the username as user.context and leave the "context" field in the login dialog box empty. You might also need to use an IP address rather than a tree [...]