El Paso (literal English translation, "the pass") is still considered a frontier bordertown for its historic character, if not for its location in the arid plains and plateaus of west Texas. It also the frontier for a fair amount of technology service companies.
In that sense, Adam Gamwell, who works and lives in the city once called El Paso del Norte being situated north of the Rio Grande River, is a frontiersman in his own right. That's because before the managed IT services arena fully came to fruition, Adam Gamwell had already primed himself to go full force into that segment of technology.
Moreover, bringing a mix of experience that includes application development, infrastructure management, telecommunications, security, and even domestic and international systems integration after mergers and acquisitions, Gamwell believes he's well positioned to make service leaps.
"Having been accountable for internally and externally managed and hosted application and infrastructure services, gave me a lot of insight into potential client's needs and the changing environment of technology," he says.
To that end, Gamwell contends that adapting to changing environments requires strong partnerships with tech vendors that can be rolled into a service line for SMB clients, who can grow to expect enterprise-level IT functionality.
"In today's economy every business needs to maximize their resources," he said. "Getting ahead of the curve helps me head off competition at the pass and having already had managed service experience helps me compete as an MSP better than someone else who is late to the game."
Posted by Jabulani Leffall on December 08, 20100 comments
The main role of uninterruptible power supplies, as I mentioned in a previous post, is that they should be an integral part of backup and disaster recovery solutions or business continuity plans rolled out by MSPs to end clients.
The role of any UPS is to provide short-term power when primary power sources at a physical location fail.
Here are five common areas where UPSs are useful:
Total power failure: That's obvious, loss of input voltage in a building means game over, you don't want that for your systems.
Power sag: The lights are not out but perhaps they are blinking, power is not at full capacity, it's weak and there is a reduction in power causing your systems to slow – not enough juice.
Power spike: This is simply two much juice. A short from too much voltage can also mean game over for a system.
Frequency instability: When a power source is unreliable, only working sporadically or subject to temporary shifts in the power lines that bring that voltage to your location.
It's along these lines that you as an MSP will be able to decide which UPS units are best suited for your clients' needs or even your needs if you provide hosted services or act as a data center or storage environment for your clients.
UPSs are divided into categories based on which of these for common problems they address.
If any or all of these are either common or events you'd like to avoid causing downtime in your processing environments, seek out your UPS units accordingly.
Posted by Jabulani Leffall on December 08, 20100 comments