And The Winner Is….

The winners (we couldn’t pick just one) are Palm Beach School for Autism and Palm Beach Chiropractic and Sports Medicine. Both will have complete network makeovers.

Xtreme Network Makeover

DedicatedIT, formerly Steinhoff Consulting, Inc., wanted to do something that would introduce our new name and, at the same time, do something for the community.

We joined with some of our business partners (Microsoft, Citrix, Jade Communications, PAETEC and MX Logic) to provide an Xtreme Network Makeover to help a company or organization that was providing a valuable service, but who could be more effective if they had better tools.

Doing Good with Very Little

The two-month process of finding just the right organization was an eye-opener for us. The entries we received gave us a better understanding of the technology needs of small businesses, schools and social safety-net organizations in our area. Most of the entries came from schools, businesses or organizations that were already involved in giving back to the community, and they all had different challenges: some had the right hardware, but not the knowledge to use it properly; some had a lack of connectivity; many were riding on the ragged edge of disaster because of data backup issues; others faced a lack of storage, security issues, slowness, a need for modern cabling and for a better means of communication.

To paraphrase an unfortunate Donald Rumsfeld quote, the organizations were going to work every day with the network they had, not the network they might want or wish to have at a later time. Regardless of their technology situations, we found that our entrants were all making do ‘until’…

On Tuesday, May 19, 2009, ‘until’ became ‘now’ for some deserving organizations when DedicatedIT, with the help of ESPN 760 Radio, announced the winners of its Xtreme Network Makeover at a celebratory event held at Rooney’s All-In Sports Bar & Grill.

In addition to the official winners, we are pleased to be able to make several ‘not-an-official-winner’ presentations.

DedicatedIT decided that we just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to do some quick fixes for some of the entrants who could get by with less than a full makeover. Our goal is to make life better for these organizations, which, in turn, will filter down to the people they serve.

Profound thanks to all of our contributing partners!

A Little about our Winners

The Palm Beach School for Autism accepts autistic children from all over Palm Beach County into school programs.The vision and purpose of The Palm Beach School for Autism is to demonstrate that all age children with autism can learn at high levels through a structured academic program based upon the principles of applied behavior analysis.

The school is housed in 1950′s era buildings on the grounds of the A.G. Holly State Hospital in Lantana, Fl. Among other things, they are struggling with a patchwork system and a lack of wireless connectivity. Wires drape across rooms and between buildings. There is no centralized backup system for their computers. They have gotten by, ‘until’…

DedicatedIT will provide a network upgrade that will immediately provide a higher grade of service and position them for future growth; something that’s important, because they have a waiting list for admissions and are planning to expand in the next year or so.

Dr. Chris Fox and Dawn Fox are owners of a small business, Palm Beach Chiropractic and Sports Medicine. Like most small businesses today, their resources are limited and they are working with a network that has been cobbled together without a central vision.

Over the years, Dr. Fox has provided hundreds of middle and high school students and members of the Police Athletic League with physicals, allowing these kids to play sports. He also provides treatment for sports injuries to charitable organizations…all of this done at no charge to youngsters who could not otherwise afford it.

A new computer network will improve Dr. Fox’s business record keeping and management, and it will allow Dr. Fox more time to provide services for so many of the local community’s students.

… and a little about the ‘Not-an-Official-Winner’ Winners

Little Smiles made everyone in this office smile right along with them. Their mission is to provide nurses with anything they request for children who are hospitalized. “We aren’t trying to cure Cancer. We just want to make the stay better while it’s being done.”

Just seeing them in action reinforced our idea of what caring and teamwork can do in communities.

Little Smiles is expanding to other states and needs to be able to communicate effectively with other offices, donors, etc. DedicatedIT will be providing the connectivity they need by hosting up to ten staff members on our HostMyIT platform for one year. This means that they don’t need a server, software, a network administrator or a backup system – we will host everything for them, and deliver it via a web browser to anywhere they are.

Waterfront Properties & Club Communities is a small real-estate business that is making its way through a rough economy. We understand the kinds of issues they have, because DedicatedIT is a small business, too.

DedicatedIT will provide a network assessment report, which will identify Waterfront Properties & Club Communities’ network issues, and let them allocate resources to correct the problems that are making them less efficient.

For 13 years, The Shepherd’s Way, along with local churches and partners in Broward County, has provided resources to homeless families who have reached a crisis point in their lives. Every day, The Shepherd’s Way and their partner organizations receive over 150 calls from families who have some degree of homelessness.

The Shepherd’s Way is expanding by converting an unused church to centralize multiple organizations in one place. Besides providing homeless families with shelter, they will provide clothing, groceries, budget counseling, pregnancy support and many other services.

When their expansion project, Hope Central, reaches the point where technology planning and design is the next order of business, DedicatedIT will provide the design consulting for Hope Central’s computer network.

This We Know

There are many organizations in our community that are in need of resources of one kind or another. DedicatedIT heard from some of them in the last two months.

Had there been unlimited resources, DedicatedIT would have made an effort to help all of the worthy organizations and businesses who submitted entries.

DedicatedIT would like to suggest that other businesses, with resources to share, take a look at the local needs and act on some of them. It Takes A Village isn’t just the title of a book.

DedicatedIT Coordinates the Donation of Servers and Networking Equipment

Recently, the South Florida Science Museum got a much needed donation from DedicatedIT and one of its long-time clients, Dickerson Florida of Fort Pierce.

A while back, DedicatedIT replaced some servers in its hosted environment to add capacity, improve performance and increase redundancy. A very powerful, yet non-virtualizable, HP Proliant server was donated to the museum.

Also, recently, Dickerson Florida upgraded their network to support server virtualization, using Citrix XenServer. Again, the HP Proliant servers were unable to support virtualization, but were still very powerful servers. Dickerson donated two HP servers and an LTO tape backup system.

“The new servers come at the perfect time”, said Jeff Gourdouze the Operations Manager at the South Florida Science Museum. The museum is currently seeing membership increase and has need for more advanced computing services like video and collaboration.

The Museum Builds Network Experts

I grew up in the local neighborhood and benefited from a annual family pass when I was a kid. I rode my bike to the museum often.

My favorite thing in that place is still there today. It is a shadow wall where, when you push a button, a flash goes off and your shadow is stuck on the wall behind you. I don’t know how much time I spent in there trying to perfect the perfect pose.

I went on a lot of field trips and other events at the museum as well. I really think this was the start of my becoming the nerd that I am today.

The Idea Behind the Xtreme Network Makeover

Seeing the impact that slightly used equipment made to a non-profit like the South Florida Science Museum really made me think about what a whole new network could do for a disadvantaged business or non-profit.

So, I set my sights on the ability to give one away for free. I asked Scott Maulsby, my General Manager, to get involved, and he called all of our partners and vendors. They came through in a big way.

Read about it here where we are giving away a whole network.

On April 8th 2009 at noon EST, after nearly six years without a serious network outage, DedicatedIT experienced a complete failure of our NetApp storage system. Our storage system is less than six months old, and is considered to be one of the best brands of storage systems in the industry. Because of the redundancy built into these systems, it is very unlikely to have a catastrophic failure like we experienced today. No data was lost.

Our techs were dispatched to our data center immediately, and NetApp priority technical support worked with them all day to restore service.

Replacement parts were delivered within two hours of the outage, but they did not fix the problem. A replacement storage system was delivered late in the evening and all data was migrated to the new system. That restored all services.

As an added precaution, a third storage system will be delivered Thursday.

I understand your frustration and know the impact this type of outage has on your business. This event brought down not only your business, but ours as well.

Our team will be reviewing our system over the next week and will determine how to mitigate this risk in the future. I will report back to you, as soon as a solid design is in place. I’ll be happy to explain, in as much detail as you would like,  what happened, what we did to fix the problem and what we are going to do to keep it from happening again.

While this type of event can happen to any business using any man-made system, it is humbling and embarrassing to have it happen to us. I apologize.

Please contact me to discuss further.

Adam Steinhoff
President/CEO
DedicatedIT – a division of Steinhoff Consulting, Inc.
Direct: (561) 491-5725
Email: asteinhoff@DedicatedIT.com
Twitter: @adamsteinhoff

Microsoft, Citrix & DedicatedIT Offer Includes New Computer Network

West Palm Beach, FL – March 30, 2009 – In this tough economic climate it’s not easy to afford a new computer network or an upgrade on a current system. Xtreme Network Makeover is a chance for your company or one you know of, to apply for an offer provided by Microsoft, Citrix and DedicatedIT, a West Palm Beach based company, Jade Communications and PAETEC. To obtain details about qualifying, please visit www.DedicatedIT.com/company/xtreme-network-makeover.

All that is required is a compelling story telling why this network upgrade will positively impact a small business and their local community. Entries will be accepted March 1st – May 7th, 2009, announcement of company that retains offer will be announced May 14th, and the Xtreme Network Makeover will be done in June 09.

“Our company wanted to find a way to give back to the local South Florida community so we teamed up with Microsoft to do this contest. We would like to help and in turn, have a company who qualifies, give back to the community as well, says Adam Steinhoff, President of DedicatedIT.

After the upgrade, the winner will have the latest Microsoft Server software, a reliable backup system to ensure that their data is safe, responsive remote access to all of the systems and three months of our award-winning monthly support service to ensure that they have everything they need. Please visit: www.DedicatedIT.com/company/xtreme-network-makeover. The network upgrade will be completed during the month of May.

DedicatedIT provides premium IT network support and consulting to small businesses with 10 to 500 employees. DedicatedIT is different, because we understand that providing technology solutions to small businesses involves more than just having highly-skilled technical people on staff.  Call 561-491-5725 or visit www.DedicatedIT.com.

CRN, one of the IT industry’s most trusted magazines, recently quoted Adam Steinhoff (DedicatedIT’s President and CEO) in an article they did on Cisco Systems’ recent job cuts:

“My biggest concern immediately is the relationships we built and if those people will survive the cuts,” said Adam Steinhoff, president and CEO of Steinhoff Consulting, a North Palm Beach, Fla.-based Cisco partner. “You spend years building these relationships, and the people are removed with one swing of the ax.”

AND….

Steinhoff said the cost-cutting initiative and the job eliminations came as no surprise as companies continue to try and navigate through a weakening economy. Both Holt and Steinhoff said Cisco’s job cuts should not affect its technological leadership.

“This shows that they’re a smart company,” Steinhoff said. “Companies that haven’t made any cuts aren’t reacting fast enough. If they’re not doing it, they’re not in step with the economy.”

Full CRN Article: Will Cisco Job Cuts Hurt Partners?

Do you feel that being aligned with companies who are cutting jobs makes it harder to provide products and services from that partner to your customers? Let’s talk about it…. leave me a comment below.

One of the benefits of being a client of Steinhoff Consulting (DedicatedIT) is that we occasionally do more for you than just provide IT services.

Earlier this week, we handed out nearly 12 tickets to our clients for the Honda Classic. I just had another bunch dropped on my desk. I have tickets for each of the following days:

• 2 - Tuesday, March 3, 2009
• 3 – Wednesday, March 4, 2009
• 1 – Thursday, March 5, 2009
• 1 – Friday, March 6, 2009
• 2 – Sunday, March 8, 2009

If you want some of the tickets, please be the first to leave a comment in the form below with the day that you would like to attend and the quantity. Please don’t be greedy.

And, in a shameless plug for our new website (that isn’t completed yet), the first person who leaves me a comment somewhere else on our DedicatedIT Blog gets two coupons for complimentary greens fees at Atlantis Country Club. The comment must be relevant to the page on which it was posted to be valid.

Happy Golfing!

On December 17th 2008, I sent this message to all of Steinhoff Consulting’s (DedicatedIT’s parent company) contacts:

Steinhoff Consulting is moving
Please update all addresses in your system(s) to:
Steinhoff Consulting, Inc.
620 Wilmot St.
West Palm Beach, FL 33405

Why are you moving?
Steinhoff Consulting has always believed in providing excellent services to you with as little impact to our Earth as possible – even before being green was cool.

Besides recycling and running nearly a paperless office, Steinhoff Consulting was one of the first IT consulting companies to begin supporting our clients via remote access. Not only did this directly benefit you by not having to wait for a tech to arrive on site to have your issue tended to, it indirectly helped you by reducing carbon emissions and conserving gas.

Our lease was up and that prompted us to sit down and calculate the amount of miles our employees drive to work each day, and it was mind-numbing: 94,738 miles each year to be exact. While some of us have more efficient cars than others, this amounted to nearly 4,712 gallons of gas each year.

As a company we decided to take another bold step in our efforts to be as green as we can be: stop commuting to work. We will be in a trial phase for 90 days while we test our customer service levels and the ability for our team to continually advance their technical expertise. Likely, this will not directly affect you in any way. Indirectly, however, we’ll be reducing carbon emissions, conserving fuel and pushing remote group collaboration technology to its limits with the hope of helping your company communicate better as a result.

What makes your move so easy?
We use the technology that we offer to you:
• Datacenter – Our equipment is in a datacenter on the Internet backbone – not in our office.
• Centralized storage from NetApp – it’s so fast, reliable and feature-packed, it’s scary.
• HP servers virtualized by Citrix XenServer – what used to take eight physical servers, takes three; and they are more reliable
• Applications delivered by Citrix XenApp – Our applications come from our datacenter and are delivered anywhere in the world over the Internet
• Voice over IP (VoIP) – Our dial tone comes from our datacenter and is delivered anywhere in the world over the Internet. I can take my phone with me anywhere.
• MS Exchange and Office Communication Server – Our team can communicate (in pairs or in groups) instantly and easily.

Moving soon? We can help! Give us a call.

I had a pretty good idea of what we were in for technology-wise, because we have been using much of the technology listed in that email since our company’s inception in 2002. What I was not sure of was how customer service was going to be impacted, what our clients and prospects would think about a company being run completely remotely and if our employees would still put in a hard-day’s work.

To quote Donald Rumsfeld:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

Over the next few months, I’ll be writing about these “known knowns”, “known unknowns” and the “unknown unknowns” and how our business has changed because of them.

Have you been considering a remote office? Are you in a remote office already? Are you in a remote office and considering a “real” office?

I’d love to hear about your thoughts and experiences.