IBM Power8 has been a reliable foundation for mission-critical workloads for the last decade. Regardless, as of 2024, the Power8 generation has officially reached its End of Support (EoS), meaning it no longer receives IBM hardware maintenance, firmware updates, or security patches.
Read More.png)
Small to medium-sized businesses are constantly under pressure to do more with less, especially when it comes to technology. With a limited budget, they face multiple challenges that can hinder growth and efficiency including costly infrastructure, defending against cyber threats, and juggling a wide range of IT responsibilities. Fortunately, there are strategic, cost-effective solutions that can help. Embracing cloud technology, investing in cybersecurity, and leveraging managed services are three ways SMBs can let their teams focus on what truly matters: serving customers and growing the business. Let’s look at each of these now.
Read More
Racksquared Data Centers Expands into Louisville, Kentucky
Read More.png)
I am new to the world of IBM Power but in the last 6 months, I've learned a lot and would like to share some of those key learnings with you. I'm going to talk about how staying current on your OS avoids trouble, why you need to follow the 3-2-1 best practices rule for backups, and how having a disaster recovery plan prepares you for a worst-case scenario.
Read More
According to TechTargets, “The term cloud came into widespread use in 2006 when Amazon launched AWS with the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service”. Since that time, there have been endless debates as to whether it is better to host IT infrastructure on-premises or in the cloud. From my perspective, the answer is a definite “it depends”. How do you figure out what’s best for you? Check out the three questions you need to ask as you determine on-premises versus the cloud. Your company should have the expertise, technology, and environment to support your business requirements.
Read More
Earlier this year, I wrote an article entitled The IBM Power Trap that described how a series of decisions related to how you manage your applications and IBM Power can leave you stuck. A few people reached out to me with questions so I thought it might be appropriate to share a real-life story about one of our customers, we will call them Glass Corp International (GCI), that got caught in this trap and had to be rescued.
Read More
IBM Power has long been known as a stable, reliable hardware platform and as a result companies have leveraged it to run their most critical business applications. For many, it has become so ingrained in their business that they would never choose to migrate away from it. But for some, IBM Power has become a trap from which they can’t escape. This is not a malicious trap that suddenly jumps up and grabs you but rather a trap that is triggered by a series of decisions made over time with each compounded by the previous. So, what are these decisions that create the trap? At Racksquared Data Centers, we have classified them into three categories, application neglect, operating system ambivalence, and hardware apathy. Let’s look at each of these.
Read More
According to the CRC Group’s June 2022 Cyber Redy Index, in Q2 2022, 82% of companies that renewed their cyber insurance had a price increase greater than 20% and of those 44% had an increase of 50% or more. Maybe most shocking is that in recent months 1 in 4 had increases greater than 100%.
Your business runs on IT and chances are if your systems are down, your business is down. Have you contemplated the most common reasons for data loss and whether your strategy can protect you in the event of natural disaster, hardware failure, fire, ransomware, human error or theft? Depending on the reason for your outage, you may experience data loss and need to leverage your backups to recover. Are you confident in your backup and recovery strategy?
One of the simplest tests you can do to assess your backup strategy is to see how you stack up against the 3-2-1 best practices for backups. This requires that you have 3 copies of your data on 2 different media with 1 of them being offsite. When I visit companies and talk to them about their backup strategies, very few are meeting the 3-2-1 best practices.
Read More
