Retail price of electricity in California is 11.53 cents per kW hour. If you run a Vostro 200 Mini in CA, fitted with Intel Pentium Dual Core E2160 processor and a 17” monitor non-stop for a year, you would burn 12264* kW hours. This will cost you $1414. Assume you have a customer in CA with 500 such Vostro Minis. He is going to burn $353, 505 for a five year period just on electricity for these desktops.
65Watts + 75Watts * 8760 hours / 1000 = 12264 kW hours
12264kW hours * 11.53 /100 * 500 * 5years = $353,505
The standard business hours 9AM-6PM Monday to Friday contribute just 27% of the overall available time.
And in these 45 hours, reports indicate that, only 60% of the time the desktops are actively used. Rest goes in breaks, phone calls, meetings, and discussions. If someone enables strict power management ** for the above case, it will result in a savings of approximately $300k
$353,505 * 0.73 = $258,058 (for non-working hours)
$353,505 * 0.27 * 0.4 = $38,178 (for 40% idle time on office hours)
Total: $258,058+$38,178 = $296,236
*Thermal Design Power of E2160 is 65Watts. For monitors its 75Watts. 65+75*8760 hours /1000 =12264 kW hour. Refer Wikipedia for TDP of other processors.
** MSP Center enables you to implement power management across multiple customers’ right from your NOC. Checkout www.mspcenterplus.com for more details.
If you are a startup MSP it’s more likely that you are using different MSP tools from different vendors. Some of these would be freeware and the rest point products. But do you know that a poor collection of such un-integrated tools can pull you down and affect growth? Read this PDF to know the 7 problems you face with using multiple MSP tools.
MSP Center Plus offers you a truly integrated MSP platform that combines Remote monitoring + Remote Management + HelpDesk + Professional Service Automation into one neat package for as low as $25 per device per year. If you are evaluating MSP platforms download this checklist and compare MSP Center Plus with other tools in the market. Hopefully you will stop juggling soon.
Being an MSP is no fun, especially if you are mid-sized. As you read this article, national players and biggies such as Dell might be talking to your customers with attractive offerings. Being a regional player with quick on-call service might no longer work out to your advantage. Now, how do you face this situation? What’s your MSP game plan?
The answer is simple. Strengthen your fortress, sharpen your arms, and fight back…because there is no plan B. You have to elevate yourself to match the breadth of services offered, at costs lower than the competition to survive this race. If you think it takes a fortune to build the capability to match their offerings, checkout the new MSP Center Plus. It gives you all the high-end features available in expensive frameworks at really lower costs. To download a BETA version of this product visit http://beta.mspcenterplus.com.
Michael Vizard feels that the upgrades to vista and the windows server would naturally push an enterprise IT manager to think of managed services route. Its not about whether your IT team can or cannot handle the pressure, its about do you really want to do this? Outsourcing the work to a partner (an MSP) at a cost-effective rate, leaves you with enough time to pour your soul into running IT better than banging your head on server upgrades.
Link to Michael's article (courtesy eweek channel insider):
May God richly bless your business all through the year. Hearty wishes for a successful 2007.
Dev Anand
OpManager Team
Hosting365.com, the leading hosting provider in Ireland has chosen OpManager MSP for their server monitoring needs. This company believes in see-our-datacenter-to-know-our-quality. Here's an excellent flash video of their datacenter infrastructure and other facilities. Checkout the widescreen NOC setup for continuous, realtime network monitoring. Really impressive datacenter.
Trainsignal.com a website run by Scott Skinger, an experienced IT trainer on Microsoft products, offers full length videos on how to configure and manage Exchange servers and covers a lot of other important topics. Click the image below to see a sample video.
Disclaimer: OpManager has no affiliations with Trainsignal. I found it good and hence trying to share it with fellow men. No post is complete with a disclaimer hence adding one :lol:
I love browsing through our customer websites. Some of them are really good. Here is one such website that i visited recently.
ps- the diff between building a product vs doing services is the gratification you get seeing a myriad of companies using your product!
In spite of increased popularity, widespread adoption, and availability of affordable MSP platforms such as OpManager MSP (shameless plug?) even today many MSPs still face problems convincing SMBs why they should outsource IT operations.
VitalNetworks (877-ITS-VITAL) is a successful MSP in greater Sacramento area. They have neatly expressed this point in their website by comparing VitalNetworks Team against an imaginary SysAdmin. Cool idea. Comparison ads, though humorous, brings out a lot of truth. Good job folks. [Remember the MAC-PC ads?]
ps - special thanks to Doug Heestand from vitalnetworks for giving me permission to write about their website. thanks Doug.
Sun Microsystems doesn't want you to build your own datacenter anymore, instead they want you to tow your datacenter to that remote location by truck...like this.
This blackbox is designed to use Solaris 10, can hold 240 Sun Fire servers and gives more than 1.4 petabytes of storage. [A petabyte of data is equivalent to 250 billion pages of text.] Pricing is not defined and is not standard though. The blackbox will be configured to your needs and you can subscribe the box on a service agreement too.
Some more pics...
ps-image courtesy crn.com
Corp