Citrix, Storage Area Networks, Virtualisation, Enterprise Vault, Windows Clustering, Brisbane Queensland based technology solutions

If you are running VMware in your environment then you need to come along and hear about the new announcements that emerged from VMWorld in Las Vegas and Vforum in Sydney, and what these really mean. Virtual Datacentre OS, VMware View - the enhanced VDI, vCloud Initiative, VI4 - what do these offer? Come along on October 24th - for more information go to our Events Page

After more full houses and excellent responses in September we are putting on another Virtualisation Overview Lunch and Learn on September 17th.

Presented in conjunction with VMware this will include live demonstrations of VMware VI3 in action on a production network - no phoney test setups, you will see a live production VMware network in action.

As a partner of VMware and Vizioncore, based in Brisbane, NewBase aim to educate and better inform organisations on what virtualisation can achieve for their network and the business benefits that this provides.

We have had great response to our Virtualisation Lunch and Learn events this year so we are continuing these in September. There will now be 3 events - September 10th, 12th, and 23rd.

The 10th is on the topic of Disaster Recovery/ Business Continuity through Virtualisation. This is presented in conjunction with VMware and Vizioncore and will challenge attendees to think about their business continuity requirements and then how virtualisation tools can be applied to achieve these.

The 12th and 23rd are an overview of Virtualisation, presented in conjunction with VMware and will include live demonstrations of VMware VI3 in action on a production network - no phoney test setups, you will see a live production VMware network in action.

An organisation approached NewBase to assist with supporting their network infrastructure and we conducted a network health check to get an understanding of the current environment. The aim of the review was to:

The review identified a number of configuration issues within the network environment that were putting the network environment at risk of equipment and data loss. These same configuration issues were also exposing the network to many security risks.

It lacked redundancy, proper security and email storage was an area of concern. The network had previously been supported by an individual who lacked the depth of knowledge and skills that NewBase has, and so the organisation was suffering stability and adaptability issues as a result of the poor network design and setup.

We were able to identify the areas of highest importance to be rectified straight away, including getting proper security controls implemented to protect their data, and provide a staged approach for improving the overall structure of the network.

We were asked to look at some issues that a company was experiencing with their Cisco switching infrastructure that was causing performance issues. All the equipment was good quality, and some of it was very new, so it was not an equipment problem.

NewBase engineers analysed the logs and conducted some performance testing then checked the configurations set up on the switches. We were able to identify a number of configuration issues to do with configs on one switch creating problems for the others and advise the customer what was needed to rectify these issues.

NewBase has a technical team with a depth of knowledge across networking, systems integration, virtualisation, security, email systems, remote access, Citrix/Terminal Server, load balancing, storage, and LAN and WAN design. If you want to partner with a solution provider that can enhance your systems contact NewBase on 3216 0776 or email info@newbase.com,au

For organisations that are unsure about the benefits that virtualisation will provide NewBase are offering Viirtualisation Capacity Assessments.

A Virtualisation Capacity Assessment will provide an understanding of how server consolidation would effect your environment and the many benefits it will provide. We will assess your current environment, performance, utilisation and provide an informative feedback report including a consolidated design plan based on your network requirements.

To discuss how your organisation could benefit from Virtualisation contact NewBase on (07) 3216 0776 or email to info@newbase.com.au

NewBase are holding regular Lunch and Learn events in Brisbane to better inform organisations on the benefits of virtualisation.

These small group interactive sessions will look at what server virtualisation can offer, including cost-effective high availability for any application, and dynamically allocating and balancing computing resources. They will discuss:

It will include live demonstrations of the technology in action in a production environment.

The next Lunch and Learn sessions are being held on August 15th (Practical DR) starting at 12pm, finishing 1.30pm and August 21st (Virtualisation Overview) in the Brisbane CBD, starting at 11.30am, finishing 1pm.

To register your interest in this or future Lunch and Learns email events@newbase.com.au

NewBase has added a popular part of our newsletters to the website with the availability of informative reports and white papers on technology topics of interest, including Reducing Total Cost of Server Ownership using Virtualisation and Building A Leak Free Enterprise. These are available in PDF format for download. Go to our Informative Reports page.

NewBase are pleased to announce that we have been awarded the status of VMware Enterprise Partner. This is is intended for organisations with the ability to help customers design, plan and deploy both traditional computing infrastructures and virtual infrastructures.

NewBase are active in finding new solutions that assist organisations to make their IT more adaptive, and virtualisation is an area that many of our clients have gained great benefit from. No matter what size your existing infrastructure, if you want to find out how virtualisation can be deployed in your environment and the benefits you can gain talk to NewBase about a virtualisation assessment.

An organisation which had grown rapidly in the intellectual property arena had cause to hold large amounts of data but was looking to move to a hosted data centre environment. The physical size of the current computer infrastructure environment was prohibitive to a cost effective Data Centre hosting environment and they did not know if the current computer infrastructure environment was capable of supporting current and future business requirements.

NewBase were brought in to provide strategic consultancy services to conduct a review of the current computer infrastructure environment with a view to provide the following services/information:

The end result has been that NewBase could give the customer a strategic direction for their IT and design a solution that would enable them to easily move to a hosted data centre.

An organisation whose key IT support staff were going to be away for a month did not want the risk of not having adequate cover on hand if their users needed support so they engaged NewBase to provide a short term Operational Management Services agreement to cover for the staff absence. This provided peace of mind and ensured a smooth operation for the users while allowing the IT staff to actually go away without the need for answering phone calls as had been the case previously.

An organisation in growth mode with multiple sites around Queensland asked NewBase to investigate how best to upgrade their struggling network and provide a mapped out path forward to enable them to implement required network upgrade solutions in managed staged components in order to support business requirements over the next 3-5 years.

The organisation had been looking at several solution design options and engaged NewBase to review these and modify where required to enable final solution design and planned stages of deployment after liaising with key stakeholders to identify the direction and requirements of the business on IT in the coming years so that the design can cater for adaptation.

If you’re looking to deploy information technology and want to work with a partner who can help you get the right result, then talk to NewBase about your needs. Phone (07) 3216 0776 or email info@newbase.com.au

We held a successful seminar on June 6th in Brisbane in conjunction with Symantec that looked at these issues and specifically:

Sean Kopelke, a specialist in data management at Symantec related his experiences with organisations that have faced legal challenges that rely on the discovery of emails and how for many organisations being able to comply with the legal requests in these scenarios is a challenge. In some organisations there are legal compliance requirements to retain all emails and files for up to 75 years, and being able to locate old information and make it available can be a challenge for most organisations. Sean talked about the methods for managing storage and streamlining data management. Availability, archiving, accessibility and compliance were all taken into consideration.

Sean outlined how Symantec Enterprise Vault can not only archive the information but improve productivity by reducing the amount of time that users spend searching for information, and how backup windows can be reduced through managing the backup process better so that files can be categorised for priority backup.

NewBase is regularly holding events looking at topical issues and how technology can assist in handling the challenges. If you want to be informed about forthcoming events in the Brisbane area send an email to: events@newbase.com.au

:: Citrix New Technologies Seminar Wrap Up:
NewBase held a very successful seminar on Friday, May 11th in Brisbane focusing on Citrix new technologies. This looked at the new products Citrix have brought on board through their acquisitions (Citrix commented that at one point there was a new acquisition every month) and where they fit:

Application streaming and performance monitoring were demonstrated with the detail that could be obtained from the Edgesight monitoring of great interest to many attendees.

The feedback from this event was extremely positive with it rated highly informative and the information clearly communicated.

NewBase are holding regular seminars on topical areas of technology including End to End Data Management, Virtualisation and Citrix. If your organisation is located around Brisbane or South East Queensland and you would like to ensure that you are informed about upcoming events then email to events@newbase.com.au and we will include you on our mailing list.

NewBase are pleased to announce that they have been confirmed as a Microsoft Gold Partner again for 2007. NewBase are recognised by Microsoft as a Gold Partner in the area of:

This reflects the wide range of services that NewBase can provide utilising Microsoft technology and the high level of skills and experience that we have in these areas. Despite the criticism that people like to direct at Microsoft products at times, it is a reality that their technology is key to most organisations and, deployed properly, it is an effective and stable solution.

An organisation with a number of branches had suffered a number of serious stability/failure issues with their aging network. These issues had caused significant impact upon both business workflow and business productivity at an unquantified expense to the business. They made the business decision to review their current core network infrastructure environment and engaged NewBase to address significant existing network performance and stability issues causing serious delays and slowdowns in normal daily business process.

We were able to design and implement a stable and adaptive network using a staged approach that allows the company to grow into their network in line with expansion plans and utilises Citrix Presentation Server, high levels of security, and storage to handle their growing data usage. We were able to utilise, reconfigure and redeploy some of the existing hardware to leverage and extend current hardware investment and to minimise cost impact of the new network environment.

Moving address is always a tricky and stressful task, but when you take into account vital IT infrastructure as well then there are added complications. NewBase recently assisted an organisation with their move to another building, which involved relocating the Network servers and WAN equipment from their current location to the new CBD building, ensuring that all of the data links were correctly transferred, and identifying any challenges in the new location that would hinder the smooth running of the network from the new address.

The equipment was dismantled by NewBase and transported by a removalist to the new location and reassembled, tested and commissioned back into production by NewBase. NewBase then powered up the relocated equipment and confirmed, with the assistance of the customer the normal operation of the equipment and the telecommunications links. The relocation was successful and enabled a smooth transition for all users to the new location.

An organisation approached NewBase to assist in upgrading of their access between several sites that were spread between cities and states, and the inclusion of a new office into their Wide Area Network. They had a proposed design which their internal personnel brought to us for advice, and we were able to assist them in improving the design and providing for greater performance and security of the communications. We were able to work with the internal personnel to share the workload of the deployment, which gave them the benefit of knowledge transfer to their internal staff and the high level experience of NewBase having worked with these technologies many times.

NewBase were invited into an organisation that had been having problems with a network upgrade carried out by an external provider which seemed to have no resolution to it. We reviewed the existing deployment and discovered failings in the existing Active Directory design which was causing the upgrade to fail. To resolve this, and provide them with a solution for their current and forthcoming needs, NewBase were able to resolve the existing issue and design an improvement to their AD and proposed upgrade, without incurring a higher cost.

A professional services organisation that is heavily reliant on its information systems was having performance and stability issues with their network. Their existing service provider could not resolve these issues, so they asked NewBase to review their set up to identify areas for improvements. The review by our engineers identified a large number of configuration issues within the network environment that were central to the root cause of the issues being experienced by a large number of staff members, which were causing frustration and affecting productivity. These same configuration issues were also exposing the organisation to many security risks.

The issues identified were relatively straightforward to rectify and NewBase has been able to work with the organisation in developing a plan to address the identified issues in a cost effective manner based on priority.

If you are a government body, or aligned to one, and you can utilise Government purchasing processes and contracts then make sure that you talk to NewBase about the Government contracts that we are a associated with, which you may be able to leverage. These cover information architecture, technical support services, security, software development and more.

These contracts are primarily for services, as this has been the focus of NewBase, but we have the ability to procure products as well.

To find out more detail about how to utilise these agreements contact NewBase on (07) 3216 0776 or email info@newbase.com.au

NewBase have recently been appointed a Gold Partner of AppSense, enabling us to offer their leading performance improvement software.

AppSense are a British company that has grown from providing performance improvement tools for their own Citrix customers to offering these worldwide. They have grown their Australian exposure with offices in Melbourne and Brisbane.

AppSense have increased their customer base as corporates and Government departments have been leading the drive to enhance system integrity, increase performance and reduce costs.

AppSense software has solved these problems for thousands of organizations and is installed on hundreds of thousands of desktops and servers across the world. AppSense solutions have been designed for servers and desktops which are based upon the Microsoft Windows platform and are ideal for Terminal Servers, Citrix Presentation Servers, Web Services and critical business systems.

Citrix and Terminal Server users may have noticed that certain applications overpower their systems when used under a Citrix environment, so other users, of the same server, are faced with poor performance. Citrix have gone some way to addressing this in their Enterprise version of Presentation Server 4 and its Application Isolation tool, but AppSense Performance Manager is a standalone option that can work with any version of Citrix, and Terminal Services to take control of the application and allow for more users per server. This reduces the hardware costs while improving the overall performance. Testing that we have conducted with clients has seen a marked increase in the number of users able to access a Citrix server, negating the need to purchase more servers.

AppSense Performance Manager is ideally suited to organisations that have key applications such as document management, line of business or practice management software that are crucial to the business, but can be resource hungry. If you’re having performance issues in a Citrix or Terminal Services environment then talk to NewBase about where AppSense may be able to help. We can organise to trial the software in your environment so you can see what improvements it can provide. Contact NewBase on (07) 3216 0776 or email info@newbase.com.au

A manufacturing company whose plant operates around the clock only allowed patching of their servers on Saturday evenings. With a large number of Windows servers, this placed a huge demand on their IT staff to update the servers with security patches in a timely fashion, and made testing the patches beforehand difficult.

To overcome this pressing time demand, and to place the control back in the hands of the IT staff, the company sought NewBase’s assistance to design and deploy an Intrusion Prevention Solution (IPS) that would provide virtual patching, so that their servers were protected from any exploits that sought to capitalise on unpatched systems. This has now given them breathing space to investigate new patches, test them and then organise deployment at their convenience, without the risk of leaving systems open.

An organisation with manufacturing in several regional areas brought in NewBase to upgrade their network which consisted of a Brisbane based head office and remote sites based in regional Queensland, all of which needed to be securely connected. This included providing firewall services, hosted centrally through a data centre, and the remote users connecting across a Wide Area Network, consisting of a Wi-Fi network in central Queensland which interfaced into a Private IP DSL network, providing access to services in Brisbane.

The project included implementing a Storage Area Network (SAN) for improved data storage and to enable future growth. This ability to seamlessly integrate additional user growth into the network infrastructure provides the organisation with the ability to capacity plan in advance, and minimise capital expenditure without the requirement to part with large outlays of capital expenditure every time a new user/s is added to the network, or new business services are required.

We were asked by an organisation running Citrix to look at their setup, as it was causing some issues and they were unhappy with the provider who had deployed it. When we reviewed it we discovered that there were a lot of holes in the system, and that performance and security aspects of it had not been taken care of. The customer had placed their trust in the previous provider to provide a system that was properly configured, so that they did not have to carry the IT skills to look after the system in-house. Unfortunately this had not happened due to the lack of skills in Citrix in the previous provider’s staff, so NewBase were required to scope a project to fix the issues and get the system up to the standard that it should originally have been configured to.

NewBase celebrated our 14th birthday in 2007, which is quite an achievement in the I.T. industry. Over the years we have seen many companies come and go, and many new products arrive with great fanfare and then plenty of them disappear quietly. Over this time we have recognised that not only does a technology product have to be good, but it needs to be properly configured, tailored to the correct needs of the organisation using it, and implemented properly. That is why so many organisations struggle to get the most out of their technology implementations, and then often blame it on the technology itself. Understanding the business need, and ensuring that the technology is the right fit is important, and then getting the deployment right. Due to our ability to deliver this, and our capacity to adapt to change over the past 15 years has ensured that we remain a key partner for many organisations who rely on their I.T. to make their business more effective.

To discuss your business requirements contact NewBase on (07) 3216 0776 or email info@newbase.com.au