ICT innovation and The Credit Crunch

Now The Credit Crunch is making new victims on a daily basis it's very likely that ICT budget will be reduced. So what do you do? Off course you want to introduce these new Microsoft services that make your life and those of your colleagues better. But when your budget is cut how do your spend it correctly on servers, consultancy and licenses.

My answer? Virtualize where possible. Nowadays Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware are a good to reduce physical servers and spend more on software or consultancy.
Especially with Hyper-V in combination with Windows 2008 Enterprise licensing will give you a good value. Because one Windows 2008 Enterprise license gives you the right to install up to 4 virtual guests based on the same licenses. Very nice.

Just released is the Hyper-V 2008 server. Free to use. Except for the guest licenses of course. Another cheap way to get started with Virtualization

Things you can virtualize based on this license type are:

• Exchange mail
• Active Directory
• Sharepoint
• Webservers
• Development

These services can be virtualized on Windows 2008 guests OS. in my own experiences with Hyper-V the only hard part is getting the right hardware.

Hyper-V has a certified server list. My experiences are with Dell Poweredge 2950 series. In combination with a lot of memory (8 GB +) and discs you can easily host up to 8 active Guests. While you busy configuring don't forget some extra NIC's (from 2 to 4). You'll thank me later.

A Dell Poweredge server with 8 GB mem and plenty of HD's is available for 3000 to 4000 euro. A Windows 2008 enterprise license for circa 2500 euro.

And with 2 dell servers and load balancing features in Hyper-V and Windows 2008 you have an excellent fast and reliable solution. At least that's how it worked out for me...

Thanks for reading. Let me know if this works for you or if I can help.

ICT Innovation and Security blog

Dear Reader,

This my blog about ICT innovation and security, or is the security and innovation? Happily for me ICT innovation creates new security threats as well decreased security risks. So which one comes first and is more important? A hard question. Which I hope to answer with a series of articles. In these articles I will try to cover important aspects of new technology and how it benefits you or might have possible security concerns.

Focussing on Microsoft products, but also covering compliancy, managed services, outsourcing, servers, firewalls, switching, virtualization and applications. From A-Z from the end-user as consumer or employee to partner or client.

In these articles I will try to apply my knowledge and experience which I have gathered the last 10 years. In my position as CTO and CSO of Payvision a credit card processing company I often have to make choices regarding to security and innovation.

Credit card processing companies need to be PCI DSS compliant nowadays. A good thing which enforces security policies and best practices with companies which process MasterCard and Visa transactions. But having this compliancy obligation innovation can be postponed or not possible, because compliancy can be more important then innovation. Or not? See my next article.

I hope my articles can shed some light on today issues and technology. But feel free to request a topic which is on your mind.

Thanks for reading. write to you soon...