March 6th Google Apps Wine Tasting in Denton

Companies are looking for ways to provide email and document accessability and reliability, yet lower their IT budget in the process. The ideal solutions must address the transient nature of an increasingly mobile workforce. Solutions must work from multiple locations, on a multitude of connected devices, and they expect their email follow them wherever they go.

Please join us for wine, appetizers and a discussion with industry leaders from CIMA Solutions Group where we’ll discuss:

• Financial and Employee benefit of Google Apps

• Client testimony from a local Denton business on what going Google has meant to them

• Considerations for applicability to your environment

• Migration and deployment approaches, and best practices

Please feel free to bring spouse or guest to this event. We are sending this out on Valentine’s day so feel free to use this event as your get out of jail free if you have not made reservations for tonight.

When: 5:30-7:00 March 6, 2012
Where: 222 West Hickory St # 103 Denton, TX 76201 (940)566-1010

Click here to Register

We hope to see you there.    Please call Todd Brown at 469-248-6332 if you have any questions.

Copyright © *|2012|* *|Cima Solutions Group|*, All rights reserved.

Happy New Year’s

Happy New Year to all of our partners! Here’s wishing you all the prosperity that your hard work can deliver!

Cima has a lot to look forward to this year - Opening of our new headquarters, furthering our efforts to take our clients to the cloud, evangelizing the difference of a RightStor process in managing your data, and continuing to foster new partnerships with our clients and new business ventures with our technology partners.

Thank you for 2011 and we look forward to working with you in 2012!

Education for a Change Minded Company

Laura Venator is our lead Google Consulant and responsible for education in all of our Google Apps deployments.  She is a Google Certified Deployment Specialist and has been working in the IT Industry for over 15 years.

November 10th Happy Hour Event featuring Google Apps and VDI from Virtual Bridges

Register Now

IT is now looking for ways to exploit modern application frameworks and virtual desktop capabilities. However, the ideal solutions must address the transient nature of an increasingly mobile workforce. Solutions must work from multiple locations, on a multitude of connected devices, and they expect their desktops, apps and data to follow them wherever they go.

Cima and Google Apps…One year and 10,000 seats later.

As we approach the anniversary of our first true Google Apps client, I thought it would be ideal to reflect on what a year has meant to us, our clients, and the Google way of life for our clients and prospects.

A year ago, Google Apps was emerging a true first class enterprise worthy alternative to on premise email and calendaring. Our initial clients fit a common profile. They were all less than 100 employees, and could no longer afford to chase email and server problems with non-IT resources, or continue to pay some to do this for them. As we went into these migrations, we were surprised with the relative ease of the migrations. Sure they require some time, but if your house is in order (LDAP if you have one), then these can be done remotely and overnight. As our business grew and larger client sizes began to make this move, we noticed that new considerations for the project become much more important than the actual migration. Change management is vital. How quickly do you move? Which user groups? What type of education?

In November we signed our first 1000+ seat client. Ebby Halliday Realtors made a decision to provide a more reliable, less costly, easier to manage, and more robust solution to their agents. They also moved their employees and corporate executives to Google Apps. Together, we developed a very structured migration and education plan. The results are a very successful project that was completed in the course of four months. You can see more of the details in the upcoming Google Enterprise Blog later this month.

Since the success of our Ebby Halliday project, the demand for Google Apps and our services has been tremendous. Microsoft has pushed hard to get their cloud based version on the market based on a “if you can’t beat them, why not join them” strategy. Cima along with many of our clients and prospects fully believe that within four years, cloud based email will be a majority leader in this market and potentially the only option available.  Google apps just hit their 4 millionth enterprise this week!

Rapid adoption is not being led just by a superior email and calendaring option with 25GB of storage at half the price. We are now seeing clients looking at Google Apps for Google Docs, Sites, Voice, Chromebooks, and even good old fashioned portals. As companies continue to look for ways to minimize their expenses around managing IT, Google will play and important role in helping them do that.  Cima will continue to develop and leverage our expertise in this space to help our growing client set which sits at 24 new clients this year alone.

So a special thanks to our long time clients, and our new family of clients. This past year has been fantastic for us because of you.

Todd Brown is the VP of Sales and Marketing at Cima Solutions Group.  He has sixteen years in the IT industry working with clients to optimize their infrastructure in order to improve efficiency and minimize expense through the use of new technologies

Customer Spotlight – TIB

TIB Bank operates on the principles of exceptional attention to the financial needs of our customers and the highest quality financial services.

The Independent BankersBank (TIB) has been a long time Cima Solutions Customer that Cima has partnered with for multiple infrastructure solutions and services.  Cima has fulfilled the role of trusted partner with TIB in the form of design and implementation services as well as support services with the use of the CimaCare services model.

CimaCare is designed to support our customers post-implementation with the the solutions we deployed.  At TIB it is in the form of standing side by side with TIB personnel during their annual DR testing using TSM and the infrastructure put in place by Cima.

In addition, with the TIB lead TSM administrator on medical leave for a for two months, TIB called upon Cima to augment their staff and become their TSM administrator a role that Cima handled seamlessly until the TIB TSM administrator returned.

Cima invests in their customers above and beyond our implementation skills in a effort to become more than just a vendor and earn the right to be called a trusted adviser.

“I never looked at CIMA as an outsource consultant, they work side by side with my team and care about TIB as much as I do. Our relationship has been based on “Trusted Partnership” and so far they have exceeded my expectation in each and every case. I look forward to many more years of friendship. Thank You CIMA!”

Si Tarighi

July Newsletter

A Message on DR  from our VP of Consulting

Having spent the past 20 years assisting customers assess, deploy, and manage their Disaster Recovery strategy, in particular the IT elements, I have seen several technical innovations that benefit this process and several tried and true standards that ultimately impact the overall success of such a plan.

The most important innovations and advancements have been in the development and implementation of virtualized servers and the sophistication and affordability of data replication technologies. Virtualization has created bundles of information that include operating system and application configuration that previously required significant time and effort and were error prone when rebuilding servers at a Disaster Recovery location.  Data replication solutions have become more and more efficient over time at only sending “new” data from the production environment to a disaster recovery environment for safe keeping and compressing it further to minimize bandwidth while maximizing synchronization.  Both drastically improve effectiveness and efficiency of getting your business back up and running.

Several principals of Disaster Recovery development and execution have remained, regardless of the new technologies available. Documentation and testing are the cornerstones of any DR plan and its ultimate success.  As a practice, we advise our clients to review, update, and test their DR plans a minimum of twice a year. Only when your plan has been executed through testing will you be assured that, in the event of a real disaster, you will be able to enact your plan and return to business in your desired time frame. The DR plan is a living document in every sense of the word. It must be incorporated into standard business practices, such as Change Management, to keep up with your ever-changing environment. Failure to adopt either of these principals exponentially contributes to the difficulty of a successful execution.

Lastly, Murphy (and his Law) will always be a key member of your DR team – whether it be hardware issues, omissions in documentation, or unavailable personnel – so be flexible and have overlapping or redundant resources even at your DR location.

I hope you find the information in this newsletter valuable and welcome any opportunity to come discuss your Disaster Recovery plan and Cima’s approach for assisting our customers be better prepared in the event of an emergency.

Mark Venator
Senior Consultant
VP Consulting Services
mvenator@cimasg.com
469-544-5820

Mark Venator, Vice President of Consulting, has been with Cima Solutions Group (Cima) since it’s inception. Cima, located in Dallas, Texas, is a solution provider of data center technologies and a reseller of cloud based solutions.  Mark’s background includes 20 years of IT consulting, and previous work at IBM in AIX advanced support,  focused on High Availability and Disaster Recovery

So, you say you have a DR Plan in place, right?

Merely having a plan in place isn’t enough, but  it’s a good start.   Next you’ll need to see that the required I.T. people and the C-level execs buy into your plan (otherwise you’ll be awfully lonely come disaster time).   Getting everyone on the same page is where it gets tricky.   Quite often the I.T. budget just doesn’t allow for the components required to deliver the kinds of RPO and RTO that management has promised.   These promises should be in the form of clearly-defined SLAs, but they often are not.

This leads to my “Three Basic Rules of Disaster Recovery”

• First, “The Safety Rule”.   The Safety Rule states that no matter how thoroughly you may have planned, there’s going to be something beyond your control that you had no way to prepare for.   Management has to be aware of the risks, and have to take responsibility for the risks they are unwilling (or financially unable) to address.
• Second, “The Recoverablity Rule”.    Odds are that you should NOT recover everything, as there is a great chance that you are hanging on to some useless data.   You need to know what you MUST recover, and how quickly you can do it.
• Third, “The Flexibility Rule”.  There’s never a “one-size-fits-all” solution that is going to get it 100% right on the hardware you have available at the time disaster strikes.   You have to be flexible enough to get things working well enough on hardware that’s “good enough” to make end users “happy enough” that their applications are available for business operations.

Of course there are PLENTY of other rules that can be added to the list, but without these three you aren’t likely to get off to a successful start.

In the end, it’s much better to avoid disasters in the first place, but that’s a topic for another time!

Cheers!
Jeff Caffey

Jeff Caffey is a Senior Technical Consultant at Cima Solutions Group.  He has spent several years in the IT industry working in a wide range of technologies, with his most recent focus on Storage Virtualization.

Look to Google for your Office Continuity Plan

This week has been an interesting one in the question of “To Cloud or Not to Cloud?” I have had several conversations with clients who are on both sides of this argument. A few clients have said that they do not see how they could move any data to the cloud based on state and federal regulations. Others have said that they are more confident with their data in the confines of a cloud service provider. A local City Manager I met with summed it up well, “Google does this for a living, we serve our Town. Shouldn’t I expect that Google can do this better than my IT staff of 1?”.

As I type this blog on my Chromebook, and that City Manager’s comments ringing in my head, I firmly believe there is a place for a blog on Google in our monthly Newsletter dedicated to Business Continuity and Recovery. Let’s start with the Chromebook itself. For those not familiar, this is a device with the form factor of a macbook air, but no OS. It’s truly just a browser with screen and keyboard. It is ideal for web based applications and companies. Gartner reports that 1 in 10 laptops are stolen. BP recently reported that one containing all of the insurance claim info from the Gulf spill was stolen. Considering the device as the first point of failure in a users experience, Google offers a new concept in Business Continuity and security for that matter. With all of the data residing elsewhere, stealing a Chromebook is like having a ticket to game 7 of the 2011 Championship. Cool to have, but gets you nothing. (Insert plug for our local Mavericks here!!!!). From a continuity perspective, that user simply needs another device such as phone, iPAD, desktop etc and they are not missing a beat.

For the next step, let’s talk about your office suite of tools (DOCS and email). Google offers a cloud based suite of products called Google Apps. Email has become a tier one critical app. So as you prepare for continuous operations for this suite, don’t instantly think about duplicating your exchange servers and mailstor at some remote colo facility, consider Google Apps as an alternative approach. If you chose not to pursue Google as your main production solution, you might look at Google Message Continuity, which allows GMAIL to mirror your exchange system in the background, storing data in the cloud and allowing users to instantly convert to GMAIL in the event of a scheduled or non-scheduled disruption. So the next time the CEO deletes his emails and you have to explain why it will take 24 hours to reload the tapes, position Google.

A final area that is emerging both in the corporate space and the consumer space is file storage. I know of several clients who are suffering from file sprawl. No compression, dedupe, or single NAS managment console creates the effect of a snowball rolling down hill. On top of that, there are immense amounts of non backed-up data sitting on laptops. Most of this data is corporate data that may be lost when the employee leaves, or the laptop leaves. As a result, companies are investing in expensive NAS solutions with armies to manage them. Google again offers an alternative. Google Docs is built into Apps. Forget about creating docs for this conversation. What is emerging as important, is a place to house docs of all types (not just Google Docs). Google Could Connect for example, allows you to automatically sync Microsoft Docs to your Google Docs folder. With Google currently offering a TB of storage for $256/year.  This is far more cost effective than a traditional NAS system.  Dropbox and other companies offer similar solutions, but not at the large scale corporate managed approach as Google.

So, this takes us back to the question of “To Cloud or Not to Cloud”.  If you are looking for a place to start, I suggest considering Cloud as a DR approach as a way to dip your toes in the water.  If you are leery of this based on security, look no further than the News.  Citigrooup, Sony and others are the ones showing up in the breach reports.  These are typically based on hackers exposing weaknesses in the readily available solutions in the market today.  One read of Google’s whitepaper on Security and you will know why they are not wasting their time here, and why Google is not showing up in the same articles.

Todd Brown is the VP of Sales and Marketing at Cima Solutions Group.  He has sixteen years in the IT industry working with clients to optimize their infrastructure in order to improve efficiency and minimize expense through the use of new technologies

Counting Down AIX

Well the countdown is on. We are less then a year away from the end of support for AIX 5.3. Customers will need to move onto AIX 6.1 or AIX 7 by April 2012 or pay extra for OS support. However, I see a lot of my customers still using AIX 5.3 and even deploying on AIX 5.3.  We all expect there to be stragglers, I still see a few servers running AIX 4.3.3, however, there is a huge install base of AIX 5.3. The reason for this is the slow adoption of AIX 6 and I see that same trend with AIX 7.

AIX 6 has been out since 2008. It offered many new features like workload partitions (WPARS) as well as security expert. The OS came out of the box with reasonable tuning parameters. Tuning an AIX 6 servers is much easier the AIX 5L.  Best of all, migration from AIX 5 to AIX 6 was fairly straight forward. This is good news for everyone still on 5.3 who should be planning for the upgrades to AIX 6. I think the reason for the slow adaption of AIX was the lack of a compelling reason to change. WPARS could have been that reason, but I do not see a lot of production WPARS out there. I think this is due to the fact that the alternative LPAR technology  is so well done that most people use it instead.  LPARS are done at the hardware and have their own AIX instance while a WPAR is within AIX and share the OS.

Unfortunately, this trend seems to be continuing for AIX 7. Version 7 has been available since September 2010, but the vast majority of the servers I see being installed are AIX 6 or AIX 5.3.  Sure, AIX 7 will provide vertical scalability of up to 1,024 threads and 256 cores in a single partition, but most people will not be using that. AIX 7 does have a few good reasons to upgrade:

• Enhanced LVM to support SSD
• Cluster aware for better availability
• WPARS now get support for VIO disk as well as fiber adapters

Unless you need them, these features may not be a compelling reason to upgrade from AIX to AIX 7. However, AIX 5.3 customers may want to go directly to AIX 7 and this is fully supported.

Bob Tortajada

Senior Technical Consultant