By now we have all heard the of the pounding Wall Street is taking, huge investment banks are being devoured by larger commercial banks like Bank of America. Now I have a close friend that works for one of these global investment banks as an analyst, a bank that was about to be on the chopping block waiting to be taken over by yet another commercial bank, and I remember him telling me that after The Great Depression a law was passed that basically said that when a bank opens for business it can either be a commercial bank, the kind that we are all used like Citi, and Chase or an investment bank, like Morgan Stanley, this little piece paper signed into law was called the Glass-Steagall Act. I am no economics expert so I have no idea why the government is allowing these purchases to occur, so “why bring this up you ask?” Simple if these behemoths are suffering like this what hope do the rest of us have?
As a typical IT freak I read a lot of literature, some on new products and technologies to keep myself current and others that deal with the way large enterprises handle their enormous data flow, all this got me thinking about ways for small business to cut back on spending. You may say that as small business owners we don’t have the same headaches or the same spending habits these large institutions do, but I beg to differ. True we may not have a large global supply chain to manage, or large work force numbering in the thousands or even large data farms that span states and countries but just like them we still have to pay the bills at the end of the month. We still have to pay for things like heating and cooling, and electricity, and while our balances may not be in the hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions, when trying to keep a business going often on a wing and prayer every little bit counts!

Today when we hear talk of virtualizing we tend to think of large enterprises and vast server farms. But these days the technology is so mature and relatively cheap that it is something that I believe small businesses should take a look at.
Recently VmWare made it’s EXSi hypervisor free for download and usage. This is a big deal for those of us that need the added flexibility of multiple servers but don’t have the space for multiple server, like us at KCCS because we run as the business out of our homes and utilizes online storage mediums as much as possible except for confidential information such as customer information. This gives us the ability to simply install this as the base OS then install what ever virtual servers we require saving us tons of space.
Another great use for virtualization is on the desktop. Recently a certain client of ours came to us with the challenge of creating an environment that he has total control of, for instance none of his remote employees will have direct access to customer information and cannot copy the customer database for their own use, while at the same time they must be able to connect remotely and work as if they were physically at the terming. After months of research and dozens of scenarios we came up with the idea of using Citrix Desktop virtualization as the solution. This idea being that we simply create about two to three virtual desktops probably using VMware and load these into the the software, from then on these virtual machines become part of the corporate network with their own ip address and access to other network resources such as the storage server.
All this would require is for the users to have a
1. high-speed connection which in this part of the North-east isn’t really a problem
2. vpn software to allow them to connect to the network
3. and finally a copy of Citrix Presentation Server on their computers