Benefits of SDWAN from a Network Professional

Benefits of a Software-defined Wide Area Network from a Network Professional

Software-defined Wide Area Network or SD-WAN has been a hot topic in networking and security circles recently.  There’s a good chance you’ve heard of it even if you’re not in the technology field.  But what is SD-WAN?  SD-WAN provides control and flexibility with multiple types of connections including MPLS, broadband, and LTE.  Policies are put in place based on metrics (bandwidth, latency, jitter, etc.) to load-balance or provide redundancy for services on the WAN.  WAN traffic can be shaped or routed across specific WAN links based on configured policies.  Once policies are defined, the software can re-route and/or prioritize traffic automatically based on those policies.

Multiple broadband circuits can be used in combination to increase bandwidth by sending traffic out all healthy links.  In the event of a circuit outage, traffic is automatically shifted to remaining healthy circuits for seamless redundancy to the end user and no manual configuration from system admins.  When the down circuit is once again healthy, SD-WAN technology detects the change and makes the resource available for use.

Mixing circuit types allows lower-priority traffic to be routed over less expensive broadband services while sending business-critical traffic over higher-SLA connections.  This flexibility allows companies to save money in communications costs while continuing to maintain a high level of service.

Security is arguably the primary benefit of SD-WAN.  Being able to segment out traffic based on business policy, visibility into branch network connectivity and problem-solving, and end-to-end encryption of data transmissions can help tighten up security deficiencies.

If you’re not already taking advantage of SD-WAN, it’s certainly a technology to investigate and see how it could benefit your company.  CTG can assist with designing and installing an SD-WAN solution for you today.  Call your CTG Sales Representative for more information.

About Convergent Technologies Group

Convergent Technologies Group, an HPE Platinum Partner, has been helping clients improve efficiency, reduce costs and increase profits since its founding in 2005. A full-service solutions-based IT company headquartered in Midlothian, Va., CTG provides businesses and organizations with the best in class solutions by partnering with the most innovative companies in the industry. CTG designs, manages, and deploys cost-effective solutions specifically aimed to address clients’ unique technology needs.

About the Author

Jeff Joyner has 25+ years of experience working in the technology field.  Jeff came to CTG after spending 20 years in the corporate IT arena and brings an additional perspective on the inner workings of corporate IT operations.  His corporate career includes working at a national printing company as well as one of the oldest brokerage firms in America.  During his career, he has architected large and diverse Data Center, Local and Wide Area Networks as well as being a leader in the security field.

Master ASE – FlexFabric Solutions

Aruba Certified ClearPass Professional (ACCP) V6.5

Aruba Certified Mobility Professional (ACMP) V6.4

Pros and Cons of Leasing Hardware

Technology seems to change every day. There is a continued acceleration in advancements, improvements, and capabilities. Starting with mainframes and amber or green illuminated monitors, information technology has the rest of the business community in a state of playing constant catch up or teetering on the cutting age. Attempts to keep up with platforms like IoT (internet of things), Converged Platforms, AI, and Software-Defined Networking, have resulted in technology becoming obsolete at a faster rate. What will be the next big thing? How will it benefit business drivers while keeping the finance side of the business happy? With various manufacturers, each doing their own enhancements, how do you find the right solution without breaking the bank as an item of capital expenditure?

Traditionally, the hardware used in today's computing environment has been purchased. While many have embraced leasing for office items like copiers and printers; hardware both for infrastructure and end-user devices, have lagged. There are pros and cons when it comes to leasing, but when working with Convergent Technologies Group, the pros always outweigh the cons.

The Pros

1. Leasing can help with life-cycle management. A company can create standards and refresh equipment based on a lease schedule, many companies do so on a 36- or 60-month calendar. The benefit is that there is no graveyard of obsolete equipment, assets to dispose of, company data left on devices or users feeling slighted when new equipment is purchased for another group or department.

2. Leasing can provide a set monthly budget and becomes an OPEX over a CAPEX, depending on your business needs.

3. Warranty support can match the lease term and help prevent out of pocket expenditures. Remember if leasing for more than 36 months, a company must purchase an upgraded warranty. Convergent Technologies Group can help identify the best support required.

4. Pay as you grow. With Hewlett Packard Enterprise GreenLake you can lease equipment and build the equipment into the lease as a 3-year growth plan. The equipment is put on location for the entire plan and you only pay for the equipment you use. Whether your business is growing or shrinking, the equipment is flexible to your needs and financial responsibility.

5. Often, a lease can be created with no upfront or minimal down payment.

The Cons

1. A company will pay more for the equipment due to leasing rates. Keep in mind, many manufacturers have a financial services group and can extend very low and competitive rates in some instances.

2. End of lease terms – The return of outdated and expiring lease equipment may be cumbersome. Find out the leasing terms before signing any leasing agreement.

3. All monthly leasing payments must be made even if a company stops using the equipment. Investigate how long equipment will be used and deployed. With the rapid pace of changing technology, equipment is normally leased for a maximum of 3-5 years. Servers and storage have seen lease terms up to 60 months in many cases.

4. Many leasing companies do not know the ins and outs of technology. Make sure you work with a technology company like Convergent Technologies Group who understands the nuances of both leasing and technology and the benefits of leasing as a financial solution.

Know the Terms

Capital lease- This is comparable to a loan. The equipment remains as an asset on the organization's balance sheet and includes depreciation.

Operating lease- The equipment's ownership is held by the leasing company and is an operating expense.

Fair-market value (FMV)- Equipment can be purchased at the end of the lease for its fair market value.

Buyout Options- The buyout is the dollar amount owed at the end of the lease. An FMV option and a one-dollar buyout option are choices in most leases. The dollar buyout option means the equipment may be purchased for one-dollar when the lease expires. FMV leases are usually lower than one-dollar buyout leases. If the company wants to upgrade to new technology when the lease expires, move forward with the FMV buyout.

Terms- A predetermined number of months the equipment will be leased. Leases for computer equipment run 24, 36 or 48 months.

Insurance- Learn if the equipment must be insured and whose responsibility it is to ensure it.

Master Lease- This is a fluid lease contract that allows a firm to add equipment to an existing lease. The new lease payment is then recalculated.

Early termination- Find any prepayment penalties if you plan to terminate the lease early. In this case, the company needs new technology sooner than originally planned.

Leasing can be confusing, but as your advocate, Convergent Technologies Group can assist any client in selecting the right plan and lease to facilitate new technology acquisitions.

About Convergent Technologies Group

Convergent Technologies Group, an HPE Platinum Partner, has been helping clients improve efficiency, reduce costs and increase profits since its founding in 2005. A full-service solutions-based IT company headquartered in Midlothian, Va., CTG provides businesses and organizations with the best in class solutions by partnering with the most innovative companies in the industry. CTG designs, manages and deploys cost-effective solutions specifically aimed to address clients’ unique technology needs.

About the Author

Elizabeth Foster has been with Convergent Technologies Group for 3 years. She has years of experience working in information technology with various types of businesses. Elizabeth currently supports our sales and marketing team.

Benefits for buying 5 years of upfront support

Why Purchasing 5 Years of support with your IT acquisitions is the best decision for you and your company

Convergent Technologies Group has been in the business of selling IT solutions and services for over 10 years and when it comes to support contracts, we have seen the best and the worst. The best involves a customer purchasing a long-term support contract with pre-determined costs and an excellent service experience. The worst involves a customer buying a short-term support contract that will fluctuate in cost annually, that seems to come up for renewal every time they sneeze. We have seen lapses in contracts where the client simply forgets to renew the contract, resulting in some stiff financial penalties when they re-establish the contract. Other not so pleasant experiences include; higher year over year costs for the same equipment due to no new purchases to leverage, forced refreshes due to the extreme costs to extend support on an IT asset, also resulting in disruptions to the business, catastrophic failures after someone missed the email notifying them their support contract was expiring, and many other unfortunate situations resulting from short-term support. 

Reasons for buying 5 years of upfront support:

• Blending the support with a hardware purchase on the front end allows the buyer to leverage the overall value of the purchase for the best discounts on both hardware and support.
• Maintaining a support contract annually requires more administrative work for your business and more chances for someone to miss a renewal.
•  Expired support contract often involves penalties, potentially costing you thousands to re-establish and put your company at risk of an uncovered incident.
• Most IT assets today have a life cycle of 5+ years versus the recommended 3-year refresh cycle of 10 years ago.
• Support costs tend to increase year over year, sometimes forcing a refresh in your technology, leading to unplanned capital expenses and planned downtime for your business.
• Maximize your investment by extending the useful life cycle of your IT assets.
• Company budgets are easier to predict with a 5-year term versus going with an annual or 3-year term with unknown costs for subsequent years.
• Avoiding the sales ploy of a low upfront cost to win the business only to take their pound of flesh in support costs for future years to make it up.
• Most companies will not provide written guarantees as to what you will pay for support beyond the initial terms, only offering estimates which can be far from reality.
• You will look like a hero when you stay within budget!

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About CTG: Convergent Technologies Group, an HPE Platinum Partner, has been helping clients improve efficiency, reduce costs and increase profits since its founding in 2005. A full-service solutions-based IT company headquartered in Midlothian, Va., CTG provides businesses and organizations with the best-in-class solutions by partnering with the most innovative companies in the industry. CTG designs, manages and deploys cost-effective solutions specifically aimed to address clients’ unique technology needs.

Join us at the 2018 Annual Technical Summit!

The time has come for the Annual Convergent Technologies Group Technical Summit! This year we will be condensing the summit into a single day on September 13^th at our Midlothian office. Every year we work hard to listen to customer feedback and wishes in order to put together an agenda focused on what our clients are looking for in their environments. Along with our own Master ASE certified engineers we will be joined by industry experts that will take a deep dive into the technologies that we are seeing have the great impact in the marketplace. This year, the focus will be on the following:

• IT trending towards Digital Transformation
• Composable infrastructure
• HyperConverged Infrastructure and where it fits
• Network Access Control and its positioning in a multi-vendor environment
• Predictive Analytics and how it eases management in your infrastructure

The concept of the Technical Summit was built around providing the end user with an event that is more than just product pitches and slide shows. The Technical Summit allows for attendees to get hands on with the technologies they are learning about, and to see the workflows in real time, running in our Live Demo Lab. The best part? No sales people are allowed in the room! We are strong believers in letting the technologies speak for themselves, and what better way than to see it live and to have a technical expert there to answer questions and work through potential issues or needs in real time!

This year we will be heading to Ruth’s Chris Steak House after the event for dinner and more conversation. There is still time to secure your spot at the Technical summit. Please reach out to events@ctgva.com or to Dalton Gormus (CTG’s Marketing Director) at dgormus@ctgva.com to RSVP today. Space is limited, and seats are going fast! We look forward to seeing you there!

HPE Discover 2018 Recap

Dalton Gormus

Last month, I attended HPE Discover 2018 in Las Vegas, NV. This was my first time in Sin City and I was transported to a whole other world. When I stepped into the Transformation Zone in the Sands Expo, I felt like I was Alice in Wonderland, completely lost but entirely intrigued. You could find everything from Lego displays to the Hack Shack. HPE Discover was a 3-day event that featured various speakers from all over the world discussing topics ranging from Blockchain to Intelligent System Tuning (IST).

The first large session I attended was, Achieving IT Agility in Mobile, IoT and Cloud with Aruba, presented by Janice Le, Aruba Networks Chief Marketer and Parth Narasimhan, Aruba, CTO. Le began the session with introducing the idea that many industries are heading into an experience economy, we are no longer buying just a good or a service, we are buying an experience. The Intelligent Edge is the experience economy we are seeing in IT, it is where smart meets digital. Aruba Networks has recently partnered with major companies like CBRE and HermanMiller Furniture to create smart and digital workplaces to make you workspace feel like home, and this is only the beginning for Aruba. CBRE is using Aruba to create smart buildings for design and IoT sensors. HermanMiller is taking their office furniture to the next level with connected desks that adjust to your height and chairs that know when you are getting up to use the restroom or if you are leaving for the evening. Narasimhan later stepped out on stage to discuss Aruba Introspect, a sensor that is used in the network to alert engineers if there is any suspicious activity going on whether it is inside or outside the company. Introspect was noted by one of our own engineers as an IT trend to keep an eye on within the next year, it is something that many companies are going to want in their tool box.

GenZ Lego Display

The General Session was the most awaited session of the week presented by Antonio Neri, HPE President and CEO. Neri addressed the digital transformation we are experiencing and the three biggest factors that HPE will be tackling during the transformation. Much like what Le was discussing with an experience economy, HPE will be focusing on transformative technology, people and economics. And to enhance this transformation the products that HPE wants to focus on are, HPE OneView, a software-defined infrastructure that eliminates the complex manual processes and increases the speed and flexibility of storage. And, Infosight, which was discussed by Aruba Networks in the previous session is another product HPE will be focusing on; currently only available for 3PAR and Nimble, but soon it will be available for all HPE products. This transformation will be vital for HPE and how companies operate, Neri said, “our purpose is to advance how we live and work”. The way we can advance and transform all of this, is to live in the intelligent edge, the “future-edge” where we interact with customers. Neri announced that HPE will be investing $4 billion into the Intelligent Edge over the next four years, only to further enhance opportunities for businesses. Following that announcement, Neri brought out Ford Motors CIO, Jeff Lemmer. The two sat on stage and discussed the strong partnership between the companies and how they will continue due to the speed and innovation HPE has shown Ford. The General Session also touched on HPE Greenlake FlexCapacity. Greenlake was featured throughout the week with displays in the Social Media forum and various sessions and booths. It is a pay-for only what you use infrastructure capacity that essentially will never run out. Pat O’Conner from Business Alliances ONX came on stage to discuss the steps to take in order to make Greenlake a part of client’s infrastructure. It is flexible, because you should never run out of the IT resources when using, it is easier for customers to engage with and it will cut down contracts exchanged by a few pages.

HPE Greenlake display

HPE made it a point to mix education and entertainment equally, which made you feel like you were not working all day. The week ended with relaxed networking and a performance by pop-rock band OneRepublic. Discover was incredibly informative, and I am grateful I was able to attend this large HPE event after only being a member of the CTG team for a few months. The biggest piece of information I took from this event was that HPE is moving in a direction that will make things simple and unified to create a better experience for partners and customers. With products like Greenlake, picking and choosing what you want rather than having it all are becoming more popular and are designed to help you save and have stronger structures.

If you are and IT professional and interested in learning more about some of these products and our services, please reach out or register for one of our events to speak with HPE and CTG experts!

Small Business, Big Opportunities!

This week we are celebrating Small Business Week. Convergent Technologies Group is highlighting the ways that IT helps small businesses grow and succeed in a fast past, technology driven world. Our company was founded in 2005 as a small business right here in Richmond, Va. Over the years we have used our technology partners to grow our organization into one that supports some of the largest Enterprise Customers in the state, while maintaining a direct focus on the Small to Mid-Size Market. No two businesses are the same and whether you are a large Enterprise, or a five-person business, IT matters and is equally as important to your success. Convergent works with small businesses to provide big business infrastructures and solutions like data storage, creating a mobile environment and working to give you ease in managing multiple systems.

Storage has become a recurring conversation with Small Businesses. In today’s data driven world, even the smallest companies are creating huge pools of storage that need to reside somewhere. In most cases, this data needs to be accessed quickly and effectively because even the smallest delays to your customers’ needs can result in lost revenue. Whether you require Direct Attach, Network Attached, or SAN attached storage, Convergent has the product portfolio and expertise to evaluate the needs of your business and offer solutions that fit within your requirements and most importantly, your budget.

Today’s workforce is more mobile than ever! Statistics show that the average end user has four to five devices that they use daily. The question that everyone is asking is how to ensure a consistent work experience, no matter the device, while maintaining the highest and most up to date security that is available. If you are like me, no matter where you go for a business meeting, the first thing you do is try to find a guest Wi-Fi to connect to while you are there. This is another point of security that nearly all businesses are having to think about and react to. The balance of providing a reliable network to your employees, clients, partners and guests, while also keeping the network and your Intellectual Property is one that we are uniquely positioned to address for our customers. We have helped customers large and small secure their networks using a variety of products and partnerships. We can sit down with you to discuss your connectivity and security needs to build the right solution for your business.

The third issue that we are consistently addressing with our Small Business Partners is the difficulty in managing multiple systems in the same environment, while finding room for all the equipment to reside. Convergent recognized the trend of the industry to move towards Hyper-Converged and Cloud ready solutions several years ago and has worked to put together solutions that will reduce space, while removing the complexity of managing multi-tenant environments. We partner with vendors that understand that ease of management, along with the ability to work with Cloud solution providers is an important step for any business, specifically small businesses.

Convergent is built around recognizing trends, both in the IT industry and within our customer-base. We work to talking with our customers to get an understanding of the challenges that they are seeing in the marketplace, and how IT will play a role in meeting those challenges head on. We are well-positioned to work with Small Businesses to provide everything from consulting to hardware, all the way down to Managed Services. Let’s sit down and talk about what your business needs out of its IT infrastructure and come up with a solution that fit the need of your specific business!

Support Center Confidential

We join our story, already in progress………

By: Jeff Garell

Yeah kid, another long, slow day in the support center.  Not like the old days.  When you were either an alpha geek or you got lunch eaten by them.  But only if you brought something good though…no one likes a cheese sandwich, ya know.  Here we only have alpha geeks.  But let me continue…. 

I got memories back to working my way up from level 1..ahhh, them was the days where 12 hours was the rule not the exception.  When your adrenaline pumped like a Texas oil well….non stop and messy.   When the phones never stopped ringing and the bosses were never happy.  You could guarantee one of them big wigs would come crashing through the door looking to take out his anger on the nearest poor soul.

Those were the days, kid.  It was like the wild west, Mardi Gras, and Carnival all rolled into one.  Every day.

But not anymore….not since we got Infosight watching our backs.  Who woulda thought that some AI would steal all the fun?  That we'd provide almost 90% of the support our customers need without sweatin' our gimlet and answer calls in less than a minute.

No call tsunamis wiping us off the map like an uninhabited pacific atoll.  No mass emails that have to be run through the approval gauntlet like a guilty soul looking for redemption.   No all hands calls in the middle of the night to figure out what has bedeviled the systems.

I don't know about you kid, but I can't run through millions of data points every second….no mere mortal can.  I tried once and stumbled like a drunk on a sidewalk made of ball bearings.  Yeah kid, it's not like it used to be…..

Now that we got Infosight watching everything, hoovering up all of that performance data from every device around the globe, we just sit back and wait for that AI to tell us what to do or what to go figure out.  Ya see, if it sees a problem that it already knows about, it'll send the emails but only to those admins that might be affected, it'll do the updates, it'll …. It'll take care of it like Tyson took care of Spinks in '88.

And if it don't know what to do it tells us where to start lookin'.  That's why we're here, son.  If one of dem customers call, we look at what our AI friend shows us and can find the answer lickety split, ya know?   Dat's why this here room is mostly empty…we don't need no level 1 or 2 fellas.

And ya know what?  This thing is spreadin'.  It ain't just gonna be our Nimble storage that the AI sees.   Quicker than a wink it'll be watching over 3PAR and I hear RMC too.  Imagine all of those systems - getting that support like ours do.  Those boys in the ivory tower are already countin' their dough with how much more productive people will be.

So that's the story, kid.  As John McClane once said, "Welcome to the party, pal".  I hope you brought a good Phillip Marlow book to keep ya entertained.    Keep yer head down and eyes open and don't bother trying to beat that AI.  Our competitors can't even get close to it, like it's a flamethrower on Guadalcanal, so you got no chance.

See ya tomorrow, kid….and Merry Christmas…