Something’s to consider when implementing a Blue Box system. When implementing a system the first thing an ITO thinks about is hardware, cost, location. These factors compounded with the stress of a new system, is probably one of the mitigating factors that delay most implementations from going live quickly.
With a Blue Box business system these factors can be reduced to assist the implementation team in making their decision. Because the technology is web based, and uses open source fundamentals the total cost of ownership (TCO) makes our technology a lot more palatable. Moving forward your first choice is simple hosted or in house.
In House:
This is the most practical solution for many clients as they feel their data is safer in the comfort of their server room, well this is a misconception. Here are some things to consider.
Cost of Hardware a decent server to run the BB2 platform will probably set you back in the region of R15 000 – R20 000 (South African Rands). This would be a Xeon 2.8, 4Gb ram, 500GB Sata Raid 0/1, DVD Rom.
Security – Your server is subject to all kinds of security issues, Physical theft is the most common factor to consider. Damage to hardware due to acts of God yes I came in one day and the roof gave in flooding my server room it happens. Malicious damage by staff, disgruntle staff have been known to take a hammer hose pipe or what ever they can find to your machine. Continuous Software updates and upgrades.
Firewall and network security.
Downtime this could be related to a number of factors like Hardware failure, theft again, network failure and many other factors.
Backups unless you have your own IT department who sits and focuses on your data backups this is the biggest downside to in house servers.
On the plus, hosting in house means faster network speed to your server. The peace of mind that you data is secure. Internet outages are not a major concern. Provided you have the right network equipment in place remote access is possible due to web based technology.
When considering in house hosting I always challenge clients to think outside their current solution and infrastructure spectrum. My challenge is always to make the use of technology. Consider going green. Look at virtualization. It is popular solution. One hardware device to manage with all your servers. Add a second server and replicate between them.
Hosted
As part of Blue Box corporate growth as well as living up to what we preach we have opted for this solution so apologies for a biased point of view.
The primary reason I opted for this solution is because we are a Global Company with many branches and users working remotely. A fully web based system makes it easy for the users to obtain data using any platform be it PC, Mobile Phone or PDA device and from any network location.
When choosing a hosted solution these are the characteristics I looked for.
Location where is the server located? We have a number of servers scatted globally. The host a variety of web sites and generally I use the United States and United Kingdom for hosting as access to these servers are relatively quick from any location in the world.
Support was a critical factor as now my corporate lively hood is on some ones network. So I checked their
Uptime most of the providers have uptime reports although 90% boast a 99.9% guarantee with a cash back for outages.
Hardware response was critical. When we did experience a hardware crash the server was swapped out and rebooted within 1 hour not bad compared to keeping your own spares in your office.
Backups, most providers offer a mirrored sql database and data sync so in the event of a disk failure they simply restore the data, there is obviously more downtime however the same will occur in a in house scenario.
TCO because I do not own the hardware I simply pay monthly for a solution that is scalable without any Capital expenditures (capex) concerns should I need to upgrade outside of the hardware life cycle. This is a real plus as most financial directors cringe at the site of their ITO’s when a new server or network system is released.
Software updates and upgrades are some one else problem reducing the requirement for expensive in house IT technicians to maintain your solutions.
In general if you looking at a web based solution for your business, you silly not to consider a Greener hosted solution. It is the way of the future; with other applications like Amazon Cloud Elastic Compute you can now make use of Geo located servers and data stores for even further redundancy, data security and pay per usage solutions.
