Technology

This morning Dell shared with customers how energy-saving technology is more than environmental awareness but good business practice that can help run small and medium businesses more efficiently. Two Dell customers,  Earth Rangers and Robertson Homes, are great examples of the benefits of green technology. Read more about their stories below.  

Earth Rangers:

Earth Rangers came to Dell with a unique challenge: they needed a technology solution that would accommodate organizational growth and support new Web projects -- all while creating a green data center to match their vision for an environmentally sustainable building.  

Earth Rangers, an environmental education nonprofit based in Canada, is focused on building a green future by transforming today’s children into a powerful and determined part of a healthier planet.

With Dell, Earth Rangers reduced operation costs without sacrificing productivity. By creating a virtualized server infrastructure using Dell PowerEdge M600blade servers, Earth Rangers was able to accommodate 100 percent growth while saving 90 percent on data center space and 85 percent on energy costs.

“We’re proud that our productive data center is small on space and big on energy savings. With assistance from Dell, we have created a sustainable IT infrastructure that reflects our environmental vision and will ultimately help our organization inspire and teach even more children in the years to come.” Gordon Jekubik, chief operating officer at Earth Rangers.

6-8-09 Update: Check out the Earth Rangers and Dell case study for even more information.

Robertson Homes:

Robertson Homes, a green home builder in St. Cloud, Florida, worked with a green consultant to identify desktops and other systems at their business worth replacing due to the power savings and other business benefits. 

Several 4-year-old Optiplex 170Ls were replaced with eight new Energy Smart OptiPlex 960 desktops and one PowerEdge blade server, which reduced their energy bill by 51 percent. To find out more about the other green workplace strategies Robertson Homes has implemented, check out Leigh Stringer's Blog on the makeover.

“Since implementing Dell’s energy-efficient systems with power-management enabled, we’ve seen our energy costs reduced significantly with no impact to our productivity. Given our commitment to being a green home builder, we are grateful to work with a technology vendor that is helping us reduce our carbon footprint without disturbing our growth.” Clint Robertson, IT manager for Robertson Homes.

When was the last time you backed up your computer data? If you are like half the people out there, it has been a long time. For small businesses, the statistics are just as scary. Almost half of all small business users don’t have a policy in place for ongoing backup of their data. They do it when they think about it, or not at all.

A more daunting statistic comes from a recent Webroot study* which stated: “While data loss is devastating for individuals, the effects can be disastrous for small business owners; one study found that 60 percent of companies that lose their data will shut down within six months.”

Now that is something to think about. If you have a small business and you are not backing up your data, you are risking more than your data. In reality, you are risking the life of your company, and the livelihood for you and everybody who works for you -- all for the cost of a simple backup solution.

With the cost of external backup devices dropping like a rock, and the variety of backup solutions on the market today, can you afford to not have a backup plan in place? It is not as hard as you might think.

Dell is working to help with all of this. This month, Dell released the new Dell Backup and Recovery Manager, or DBRM for all Vostro, Latitude, Dell Precision, and OptiPlex systems. DBRM delivers a new simplified user experience that allows user to perform some very interesting backup and recovery tasks, and even more.

Yes, it does backups, images, data restore… All of the tasks you would expect from a backup utility. But, it also allows you to create recovery media like the Dell recovery CD, Diagnostics, and even OS Media. Also, you can create these images on a variety of bootable devices like flash drives, external storage, or the trusty DVD.

No more excuses -- all it takes is a little discipline to setup your backup schedules, create your recovery media, plug in and map to an external backup device. From that point on your backups will happen on an automatic schedule. And, with your newly created backup images you are never more than a few clicks from a complete system restore, or access to that single critical file if you happen to experience a system failure or data loss.

*Webroot, September 2008

Travel is a necessity of any business. However, with the economy the way it is, small businesses must plan to shave some money off their operating budget somewhere. Each year, more businesses are looking to alternative conferencing solutions to help manage costs. One way a business can save money is by videoconferencing, also known as web conferencing. It has been around for awhile, but with the latest technology it’s now available and affordable for small businesses.

Videoconferencing can save both time and money—and who doesn’t need that today? According to a recent study by the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, 71% of businesses plan to spend less on travel in 2009.

Since many businesses are not spending money on travel, would videoconferencing be a reasonable alternative for small businesses with clients that reside well outside their zip code. Of the participants polled on our Facebook Site (84 total votes), 73% of entrepreneurs plan to use videoconferencing in the next year instead of travel. Some comments by participants indicated why videoconferencing makes sense and how it can be implemented:

· Mike Saint – We have installed [videoconferencing] systems in five of 10 offices of our consulting firm that specializes in land use politics. Will soon add equipment to London office.

· Corey Frisbee - We still try to deal face to face with customers any time possible, but videoconferencing is a great second choice

· Jt Clough - Can bring dog training using video to people "live" with real dogs as examples using video conferencing. More good dogs, more people who feel like wagging on a daily basis as well!

Videoconferencing can also help your business creatively show prospective customers how progressive your company is by having the latest technology. Today, Dell announced a new line of Vostro™ laptops with free, integrated Dell Video Chat videoconferencing software. Dell Video Chat will enable you to record high-quality video, chat with up to four people at one time, and easily email securely. For even more about Dell Video Chat and the newest Vostro laptops, check out the release.

Also, share how you are using Web cameras and videoconferencing to grow and manage your business by submitting comments here on the blog and videos in our YouTube Group.

In the post from last week, Steve Felice explains how small and medium businesses can benefit from our newest enterprise solutions. When smaller companies grow, the necessary technology changes often fall into the hands of the president or CEO. Even if you do have an IT Manager or consultant, it’s important, as an entrepreneur, to understand why upgrading your servers can lift business efficiency in a down economy.

To better understand how our new streamlined enterprise solutions could benefit some of our mid-sized customers, we asked ScaleMP to ‘test-drive’ our PowerEdge™ M610 blade server. ScaleMP is a leading provider of virtualization for high-end computing, experiencing major growth as a company (Linux Magazine recently named them one of the top 20 Companies to Watch in 2009).

Their software product vSMP Foundation is used to replace the custom hardware and components that make traditional symmetric multiprocessors expensive. vSMP Foundation can aggregate up to 16 x86 systems to create a single system with 4 to 32 processors (128 cores) and up to 1 TB of shared memory. Their widgetry also simplifies clustering infrastructure with a single operating system.

As a company providing a simplified virtualization solution, ScaleMP needed improved performance from their own servers to better scale their technology. Shai Fultheim, ScaleMP’s Founder and CEO told us that the performance increase delivered by the M610 blade servers meant a significant and quick return on investment for their customers.

With the new servers and software, ScaleMP not only saw an amazing performance improvement over the previous generation of servers but made the total IT solution easier to manage and use. The ScaleMP and Dell solution they now can offer customers affords them more time and resources to start doing new things. For Shai Fultheim, working with Dell on these servers helps his company innovate with other businesses to make advances in the High Performance Computing (HPC) frontier.

Small businesses are the lifeblood of the British economy, but in the recession they are suffering dearly.  The Federation of Small Businesses predicts that over 32,000 small businesses will close this year, with a loss of 150,000 UK jobs.  It was therefore with a little trepidation that I approach my speech last weekend at the FSB's annual conference - this is a huge community that is searching for answers on how best to survive the recession and I sincerely hoped I could offer some advice to help businesses save money on the IT side. It could make all the difference.

The FSB Annual Conference was held this year at the beautiful Celtic Manor grounds in South Wales, home of the Ryder Cup Course. The theme of the conference was 'firing up the UK economy' and touched on the true spirit of the entrepreneur - that of an opportunist, looking to make the best of any situation. The FSB Chairman, John Wright, made a great speech saying that he “would not pander to scepticism.” Entrepreneurs truly are born optimists.

Looking at the stands at the FSB conference I realised how incredibly innovative British small businesses are. It’s remarkable to see how people who have suffered from the recession have ventured out and seized the opportunities around at the moment. Claire Robertson is a great example.  As a former Woolworths manager, she lost her job when the chain shut down.  She wrote a new business plan and re-opened her Woolworths store as Wellworth’s, attracting huge media attention and DJ Chris Evan's to reopen the store. People like Claire are motivating others to view the recession as an opportunity to become small business owners.

This is why I was excited to be presenting at this year’s Federation of Small Businesses Conference. It is the second year Dell has sponsored the conference  and it's a great information resource for small businesses.  It really highlights the strength and influence of the small business sector here in the UK. Leading politicians, business gurus and inspirational achievers will share their experiences and expertise through presentations and seminars and will be available to answer questions.

My speech looked at IT, which is probably way down their agenda at the moment. But I felt it was important as a Dell representative to stress that IT can play a vital role in helping small businesses grow. The worst thing they can do is nothing. "If it’s not broken, why fix it?” can easily be a small business owners attitude to IT in a recession, but the truth is that making some simple, selective and smart investments in technology can not only help build a business, it can also make a business run better and save money just when it’s needed.

At Dell, we believe that the right IT environment can have a positive effect on a small business. The conference was a great opportunity for us to offer some practical tips for entrepreneurs on using their IT and to let them know that Dell is committed to helping them save money. I couldn’t have enjoyed stressing that more.