Mosaic Technology

Mosaic Technology is pleased to announce their recent partnership with HP. Mosaic has recognized HP for a long time as a very large install base as well as customer base, and feel that it is a great fit for their current as well as future customers.

Mosaic’s most recent product line is HP’s Renew Program which offers an approved and vender supported cost effective alternative to buying new equipment. However, unlike other Renew Programs, HP’s comes with the same warranty and support that the new systems come with.

In the time of reduced capital expenditures and budgets, the HP Renew Program gives customers an alternative to buying brand new current generation equipment.

Mosaic’s partnership with HP is completely customer driven. In today’s IT environment, 80 percent of IT budgets are consumed by legacy and last generation Systems. Mosaic is constantly working with their customers to support these growing needs and solutions.

HP Renew products are factory sealed from HP, carry up to a 3-year HP warranty, and come in like new condition. Additionally, Mosaic is able to create end-to-end solutions for its customers that integrate best-of-breed technology from partners like HP to meet today’s real world challenges.

Mosaic offers the custom configuration, presale support, as well as a worldwide distribution channel to distribute the product. It is a best of both worlds situation – with the HP Renew Program you are receiving the same products from HP at a reduced rate, along with an exceptional level of support from Mosaic.

Want to learn more about how you can save money for your company, while maintaining your legacy environments? Contact a Mosaic representative today.

Most people think of virtualization and the cloud as two separate things, however, what you may not realize is that when you virtualize – you’re moving to the cloud already.

Transitioning to the cloud begins with the creation of a private cloud. When you’re hosting your own cloud environment, you no longer have physical attachments to those servers anymore, but a grouping of resources in your environment instead.

As things in the virtual world evolve, you are now able to take those stand alone operations and build virtual machines in a way that adheres to cloud standards, but keep them internally in your private cloud. This allows you to take the next step in completely moving to the cloud.

Small to medium businesses are now able to simply move those virtual machines from their own private cloud into a public cloud. This gives the ability to be even more dynamic than to simply virtualize.

This is a great asset for mobile workforces because if they are unable to virtualize, they can still put a lot of their services out into the cloud. Information is made available by a secure weblink, which in turn gives you the ability to reach out to mobile workers, a non-traditional practice, because these services are available from anywhere.

VMware is one company that is really taking advantage of this service by utilizing the View Client for the iPad. The View Client allows iPad users to connect to a virtual desktop, which could reside in a private cloud in the corporate datacenter or a public cloud from a Service Provider.  This allows their iPad to serve as a portable work station, granting mobile users access to corporate resources while on the road, but without having to carry a computer.  Additionally, those assets reside within the datacenter, so there is no risk of a security breach if the iPad is lost or stolen.

A combination of virtualizing and moving to a private cloud can be augmented by moving to a public cloud – allowing for more points of access and more ways to connect.

At Mosaic Technology, we believe that this is the best way to go about moving to the cloud. Want to learn more? Contact a Mosaic representative today.

What is all the hype around cloud storage, anyway? Is it really ready to support all of your needs? When considering the adoption of cloud storage, you should think about several things – capacity needs, data protection, high availability, performance and data life cycle, to name a few.

Most organizations are managing Terabytes of unstructured data and also have to protect it. Why not leverage some of the storage cloud providers to manage that for you?

Did you know that 70 to 80 percent of your unstructured data makes up the majority of your storage problems? If you archive that to the cloud, you’ll never have to back it up again – and the cloud now becomes responsible for the availability of that data. This would greatly reduce the capacity that you’d need in your environment. One of the benefits that goes beyond diminishing capacity requirements and the need to protect this data is that you could actually increase the performance of your environment by doing so. Since this is archived data, you don’t need any of the performance requirements associated with your tier 1 data – and the data is encrypted. This makes your information extra secure because only you have the keys to un-encrypt it.

With the advent of SAN technologies that allow you to leverage features such as snapshots and replication, which you may have already invested in, you may be wondering why you would need your backup application locally. Here are two scenarios to consider:

Your exchange and file servers are either physical or virtual and they are connected to a SAN (iSCSI or Fibre Channel) and you were just hit by a virus. You happen to be running regular snapshots. Would you leverage your backup application or would you go to your last known good snapshot and restore your data within seconds or minutes, instead of having to restore it from your backup over several hours? Of course you would use your snapshots for recovery.

Or say your company’s data center just went down because of a major fire. Your IT infrastructure is being replicated to a designated DR site using your SAN technology. You need to restore your data as soon as you can. Do you restore from backups? No, you restore your data using the replication feature of your SAN.

So, why do you need local backups locally again? Mosaic is here to tell you that you don’t. Stop spending your money on your backup environment if you are leveraging SAN technologies because chances are you will never use them. They are there for long term archival purposes only.

Therefore, leveraging cloud storage providers to augment your archived data as well as your backup data actually makes better sense, as you do not need to invest in that infrastructure. By the time you actually account for the investment you are making to buy tapes, to store tapes, to continue to scale out your backup environment because your data will not stop growing, you may actually pay a lot less to host this in the cloud – and it is safe!

If you are interested in discussing this further, please do not hesitate to contact us at Mosaic Technology.

Ever have the problem of not being able to backup all of your data? Do you back up the same old data over and over again? Or maybe your exchange and file server data just keeps on growing? Mosaic Technology may have an answer for you.

All backup vendors that are trying to sell you their stuff will tell you the same thing – their technology is the fastest. Unfortunately, most of them are not telling you everything you really need to know.

All backup products are just that – they allow you to backup your data, and most can provide you with portability from disk to tape and can also backup your virtual environment. However, these solutions are not really addressing the real issue. The fact of the matter is that every day you backup the same data and it seems like every year you have to allocate additional budgets for your backup infrastructure. This practice is repeated annually and as far as vendors are concerned, this is like an annuity that they can count on because most of you will do just that – buy more licenses and more capacity for your environment – and they would like to keep it that way.

But what if you didn’t have to back up your old data anymore, or could at least back it up less frequently? What if you could maintain the investment and not increase your existing backup infrastructure? What if you could restore your data much faster and could improve the efficiency through intelligent data management?

Interested? Well you’re in luck, because there is a way. Intelligent archiving solutions provide you with the ability to move data that has not had any access from anyone to less expensive storage mediums without affecting those same users. With this capability, you can diminish impact on your Tier 1 storage – increasing the performance. Also with intelligent archiving solutions, you only have to backup data that has been archived one time. This means that you don’t have to continue to buy more capacity and licenses from your backup vendors, your archived data can have an automated deletion policy so you don’t have to manage individual files, the data can be held for litigation and/or chain of custody requirements, and this data is still available to your end users and can be recalled from their directory structure anytime and without any special tools.

At Mosaic, we’ve come to find over the years from the many projects we’ve designed, managed and implemented, that over 80 percent of the data that sits on your file server is not accessed anymore after about 120 days and when it is accessed, and only a very small number of users actually go back that far. With Exchange, that number decreases to 30 days. If that is the case, shouldn’t you at least look at ways to help solve this?

In the past, archiving solutions were expensive, hard to manage and even harder to implement. Lots has changed and with the larger adoption of these types of technologies, now is a great time to look at some of them and see if any make sense for you. While some of these technologies leverage short cuts, symbolic links or weblinks, others can archive without using these short cuts by virtualizing your file systems.

The discussion does not end here, however. There is much more information to come on this topic as it relates to storage vendors who claim to have the fastest storage and can tier within their frame. Stay tuned to Mosaic Technology for the latest data backup and archiving news!

Its official: virtualization has hit the mainstream. Three or four years ago, IT professionals and customers were leery about virtualization, or maybe some just hadn’t gotten around to it. Today, however, it is no longer new technology – but established. It is now just one of the additional tools that will be used inside the data center. The risks involved with virtualization are minimized as well – with more adoption comes less apprehension. Virtualization out of the gate is becoming an accepted practice; it is now almost second nature for new startup companies to virtualize. That being said, there are still companies who have not yet adopted virtualization, and reasons for that may vary.

Certain mainframe servers cannot be virtualized on VMWare because it would not fit their infrastructure. Manufacturing, data entry and large banking institutions are known for using Sun or Unix servers that do not support virtualization. If they are running normally and are stable, these companies are likely to continue buying more sun servers rather than completely changing their infrastructure. Not only would they have to change their product, but their whole platform as well.

Another reason is that certain companies may not be educated on virtualization, and therefore don’t know about the significant savings and advantages that come with it. For a company whose data center has 15-20 servers, IT systems people are busy all day long keeping everything running – and don’t have enough resources to internally investigate virtualization.

The benefits of virtualization are non-debatable, however. By virtualizing the data center, you also greatly decrease the workload on the IT staff because you have fewer moving pieces. With virtualization, there are only three or four servers and fewer hardware resources to manage. Traditionally, there are a lot of physical moving parts, as well as more hardware resources that need to be managed. Virtualization allows for an increase in the ability to manage all servers and a decrease in maintenance costs.

In a virtualized world, templates can be built of servers so that copies can be made – this ensures that the operating systems are all the same. It also provides you with the confidence that every single server is backed up and saved. Also, when it comes time to build a new virtual machine, you don’t have to order and rebuild all new servers. With VDI, bringing new servers online can now take five minutes verses a matter of weeks it would take for professionals to deploy the applications in the previous world.

When deploying virtualization, professionals can manage up to five times more servers than normal. The benefits are undeniable; VDI is the only way to go. Ready to make the switch? Continue this conversation with a Mosaic professional today by clicking here.

As the old saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. This is especially true when it comes to enterprise security. Fortunately, Mosaic Technology has the cure – and it comes in the form of virtual desktop infrastructure.

It is no secret that there are a lot of concerns surrounding enterprise security – malware infections and data leaks to only name a few. With the emergence of tablets and smartphones, PCs and laptops are becoming a thing of the past – and this creates a whole new set of problems for security and risk professionals to tackle. In such a hectic environment, it can be tough to maintain employee innovation as well as flexibility.  

By deploying VDI, many of these concerns are laid to rest. The information is stored in the data center and not the end-user device. This way, if the computer is lost or stolen, your business data is not. Also with VDI, you are able to take back control of who can access your company’s information. IT organizations are able to set controls on what information can be downloaded, copied to an external hard drive and what can be shared. It’s too bad the US government didn’t use VDI – Wikileaks could have been prevented all together.

A virtual desktop infrastructure also allows you to control how the user works with their device. Accessibility of social media plug-ins and third-party application downloads are yours to control. VDI allows you to add an extra layer of security with the “hypervisor layer” – the intelligence that monitors and prevents hackers and other security risks. In the event that a virus does occur, you can launch virus removal and protection tools from the data center that immediately updates the security measures on all users’ desktops. Without VDI, it would take hours to physically install the virus updates on everyone’s device individually.

VDI is also able to protect employees from identity theft. With advanced security protection in the datacenter, you can monitor and prevent malware that tracks keystrokes or steals information unknown to the user.

For all solutions for your tablets, laptops and PCs, choose Mosaic Technology – they keep your business moving with connectivity anywhere business happens. Interested in learning more about how VDI can keep your business safe and secure? Click here to continue the conversation with a Mosaic expert today.