Small Office Computing

By

Michael C. Barnes
President, NorhTec

Large Organizations have facilities called data centers that are the heart of the organization's IT infrastructure. Most data centers are located in a special facility with raised floors, air conditioning and teams of experts that keep everything running smoothly.

The servers in the data center hold the corporation's most sensitive data and run the applications that are mission critical for the organization's survival. A lot of money is spent to protect this data. Many of the servers are fault tolerant or highly available. This means that these systems have redundancy that insures these servers are operating and on line at least 99.999% of the time.

If these vital systems fail, then the organization is unable to operate. These servers keep airplanes flying on schedule, make sure customer orders are accepted, keep inventory, hold human resource information and keep telephone lines working.

Many data centers to go to extremes to make sure their systems continue to operate and that the data on these systems is protected. Many data centers have backup recovery centers (BRCs), where all the data is replicated at an off site facility, ready to come on line should a disaster occur at the primary site.

Data Centers use sophisticated backup systems to make sure that they can quickly recover data no matter what happens. The professionals working inside these data centers are highly trained and usually well paid.

Outside the data center, things get a bit sloppier. Generally speaking, computers are added as new people join the organization. Each person has their own disk drive and they are responsible on their machine. This is not such a problem as most of these organizations tie the PCs into the data center and vital data is never really stored on these PCs. The PCs are used simply as clients that access data on servers. Should the PC fail, a new PC will access the same data that is safely stored and maintained behind the glass walls of the data center.

Many organizations start out small and grow. As an organization grows, they add more and more PCs and things start to get pretty complex. Most small offices use a networking style called “peer-to-peer”. Peer-to-peer computing means that every computer in the network is independent of one another. The data each individual needs to perform their function is stored on their own local hard disk. Each user is responsible for backing up their own data and each system has to be independently protected against viruses.

There comes a point in every organization where they reach a point where peer-to-peer computing becomes unwieldy and things quickly degrade to chaos. There is no central control of information and no assurance that the data a given individual is using is the latest or most accurate information.

At some point, disaster can and often strikes. The hard disk holding all the customer data crashes. The information is gone. The company's inventory database gets infected with a virus that wipes out all the data. Someone makes a mistake and deletes a vital file.

Historically, the solution has been for organizations to invest in building a data center. There is no more expensive investment than to invest in infrastructure. Many organizations will continue to flirt with disaster and leave their vital information dangerously exposed until the situation reaches a crises point.

NorhTec's tag line is “networking out of the box”. This tagline has two meanings. The first meaning is that our products are designed to solve networking problems in a way that the solution is as easy as taking the product out of the box and plugging it in. The other meaning is that we take an “out of the box” approach to solve problems creatively.

NorhTec's newest product is called the Digital Filing Cabinet (DFC). The name of the product describes completely what the product does. The DFC is a device that allows you to store all your vital information securely.

Imagine that the information now stored on computers were are in paper form rather than in digital form. Imagine that you can see the data in your organization as it is scattered around the office. The image that you would visualize would show that your vital documents are spread all over your employee's desks. Nothing is properly filed. Only the person handling the documents knows where anything is or how to use it.

An office manager would require that all of this information were properly sorted and stored in folders that are stored in drawers in a filing cabinet. Anyone needing to access information would know how to access the information by simply going to the filing cabinet.

Some filing cabinets would be locked and only some worker would have keys to access that information. Some files will be too sensitive to be left in a public area so you would keep this information in a more secure area.

NorhTec's Digital Filing Cabinet provides the facility to create the same level of security and organization for your company's important data.

The Digital Filing Cabinet is a small, silent network appliance that is specially configured to securely store your company's important information. The DFC contains two 120 GB hard disks that are mirror imaged. This means that both disks store the same information so that you data is automatically backed up. If a hard disk crashes, the other hard disk continues to operate. Replacing the failed drive is all that is required.

The DFC is automatically visitable to each user on the network. To use the system, all that is required is to access the DFC via Microsoft's Network Neighborhood. Existing files are simply copied from local hard disks onto the DFC and users will then create an ICON to their desktop so that they now store and update information onto the DFC.

Datacenters use systems that work just like the DFC. These are called Network Storage Arrays. These devices are often very large and expensive. The DFC provides the same level of data integrity as a costly Network Storage Array but in a small, inexpensive package.

Because data will be available on a single device rather than spread out in multiple machines, it is now possible to establish a virtual private network (VPN) for workers to access information even when they are off site. NorhTec can assist your organization in setting up a secure firewall with virtual private network using one of our Microservers.

Additionally, because the Digital Filing Cabinet puts your data on a GNU/Linux based server, your data is now far more safe from viruses. It is now possible to create a “loop-back” encryption system that will allow you to encrypt data that is stored on the DFC.

NorhTec's Digital Filing Cabinet brings data center level performance and security to the office without requiring either the infrastructure or staff that a data center requires.