Hey, IT pros. Juan here again. Are you down with downtime? I am not. Although
it's not ideal, it's a reality. So let's address it.
Tim, Thanks for joining us today to talk about downtime. Can you tell our
IT pros a little bit about yourself? Well, I am the solution architect
for Hewlett Packard Enterprise small and medium business solutions. I spent 20 years
in the military, learned a lot of technology there, and then after
the military, it was a natural shift into IT, where I was assist admin
for several years, and now I am working here at Hewlett Packard Enterprise
as a solution architect. So you actually worked in the small business,
and then you moved on to helping small businesses. That's correct. So, as far as downtime,
what kind of solutions does your position provide to mitigate those?
So in SMB, it's a struggle, right? Because you have to balance how
much things cost with what capabilities you have. And of course, you know,
small and medium businesses don't have the resources that bigger
companies have to invest in their IT environment, so they have to balance.
They have to figure out what priorities that need to be addressed and
figure out what is most important to them and then consider that from the top down.
So they start by looking at what are some areas that
are potential single points of failures, for instance. Sometimes downtime is not
avoidable, but you can have good downtime where you take time to take
your network down or take parts of your network down in order to do those kinds
of maintenance things that help keep it running. We look at small businesses,
and the ultimate plan is to grow. So we have to plan for growth all the time.
Absolutely. So what are some tips that you could give to help us understand
the approach to kind of growth and mitigating some of the single point of failures?
Sure, so actually, it starts when you are first building your
network that you want to plan for growth so you can't wait to you are
growing to start planning. A lot of that has to do with things that don't even
involve technology. It involves how you manage your IP addresses, for instance,
your network or things like that, that are not necessarily specific to
a piece of hardware. But, as far as the hardware goes, having hardware that
can be expanded helps. So, Tim, what are some key reasons why our environment
will experience downtime? Well, there is hardware failure. Those things
are easily mitigated by making sure you have some redundancy in your systems.
But then the more difficult one would be things like cyber attacks.
So cyber attacks are very prominent. They are prevalent today, and you can
defend against them, but they are much harder to defend against because
that's an unknown, right? And so, getting some extra help in that regard,
will definitely go a long way towards protecting you and making sure your
systems are updated. So spending that quality time with your downtime,
your planned downtime, then you can help keep your system from being
a target for cyber attack. What are some good ideas for preventing single points
of failure? Well, single point failures, you know, if you have just one thing
and it goes down, then you are down. So having duplicate things like that.
So, for instance, duplicate switches, duplicate servers,
those kinds of things can help prevent a single point of failure. Within each
of those pieces of equipment, there is actually usually some redundancy built in
such as many items in the IT environment will have redundant power supplies.
They will have redundant disc drives for being able to recover.
If one disk drive dies, another one keeps going, so it keeps the server
running while you replace that disk. Many of them are actually
hot-swappable. So if you were to leave us with something today to help us
mitigate any future downtime, what would that be? Well, the first thing would be,
you know, if you have the luxury and you are starting off
from the ground up, then planning ahead for growth is the biggest thing.
Making sure that you don't pin yourself into a corner, so to speak,
with limited hardware. Secondly, the biggest thing that you can do is plan periodic
maintenance. So if you do that by keeping up your security patches,
keeping up your firmware updates, those things will help prevent you from being
attacked, for instance, from a hack that will help prevent downtime, right?
Right.
So, planning ahead for maintenance. And then I guess finally really is when you
were able to, you need to expand into thinking about redundant systems so
that you have one system take over when the other system fails.
Well, you heard it from the expert. Big thanks to Tim for stopping by today. Now, Tim,
go take your downtime. Yes, sir.