We're bringing the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet to you!



The BlackBerry Road Tour is coming your way. And you're invited to attend a full day of sales and technical training – exclusively for technology resellers – for FREE!

Come see an in-depth live demo of the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet and discover everything you need to help you maximize revenues with the breadth of offerings available with the BlackBerry Solution today. Plus... registered attendees are eligible for a $50 Visa® Reward Card¹!

Another great reason to attend! But hurry, there's only one training session scheduled for your area. Register now to guarantee your spot. We look forward to seeing you soon in either Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles or Washington, D.C.!

Chicago – Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Boston – Thursday, February 10, 2011
Los Angeles/Orange County – Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Washington, DC – Tuesday, February 22, 2011 The BlackBerry Solution Provider Network Team

REGISTER HERE

¹ Full details of how to earn a $50 Visa® reward card will be provided at each event.

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 As tape backup has migrated to hard drive backup strategies, VARs and MSPs are choosing between Direct Attached Storage (DAS), Network Attached Storage (NAS), cloud backup, or some combination.  Dedicated NAS backup appliances (often called BDRs – short for Backup and Disaster Recovery) that offsite to the cloud have tempted MSPs who want to avoid going into the field and touching the backup.  Yet limited capacity, low speed, high cost, poor recovery, and BDR bugs have left many VARs disillusioned.  At the low end of the cost spectrum some have gone back to USB hard drives, but these are hardly a robust backup solution, even for SMB.

Highly Reliable Systems based in Reno, NV addresses these problems by building both DAS and NAS devices with integrated mirroring controllers designed to automatically create redundant local copies of back up data.  We recently updated our eSATA and USB 3.0 connected single and multi-drive backup systems.  These address the need for size, speed, and most importantly, recovery with 3TB removable SATA drives and mirroring speeds of 200 – 400 Gigabytes per hour.  Our enterprise model, called the RAIDFrame, is shipping with 4TB removable drive Pacs.  By summer they’ll use 6TB removable Pacs (RAID5) and 9TB (in RAID0).  A 5 bay RAIDFrame will thus backup 45TB of data.  Our products have fully enclosed hard drive trays designed for daily plug and unplug cycles.  This gives the customer or IT pro physical control of the data while optionally off-siting to the cloud.  For example, our FirstRAID with Automatic Mirroring Technology (AMT) lets the customer use software like ShadowProtect to create continuous incremental backups to an external RAID 5 array, while automatically producing additional copies to the removable drive. Replacing the bottom drive begins a new mirror automatically without any user intervention. Another large advantage of the DAS connected FirstRAID is that backups are 2 to 3 times faster than a typical NAS.  Highly Reliable Systems sells 1 to 10 bay units.   Single bay USB 3.0 models start at $230 (plus cost of controller and media).  

For more information go to www.High-Rely.com or call 775-329-5139

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Join this webinar for expert advice on building your IT support business.

Following on from the success of last month’s webinar on warming up prospective customers, Robert Peretson, CEO, Successful Computer Consulting and GFI's Chris Martin delve deeper into the sales cycle with a proven process to help you:

Conduct a perfect meeting
Overcome common objections
Provide an effective demonstration
COMMUNICATE to deal the deal!

Thu, Mar 24, 2011 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PDT
 
REGISTER HERE

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Not deterred by a flight delay out of Seattle, myself and Chris Bangs waltzed into to the robust D&H Distributing West Coast at the Pacific Palms (nice!) in Industry Hills, a suburb of LA, CA. I hurriedly delivered a speech on VoIP/UC, Server Secrets (focused on Multipoint Server) and document management. Chris set up our booth – which was in a prime location – front of the venue! Over the evening several hundred (perhaps 500) SMB resellers checked out the services and wares offered from 60+ vendors including Microsoft, HP, Intel and Cisco.

A shout out to Cisco for presenting its new UC 320 telephone system that I have deemed a capable Response Point replacement – ease of us, low price and fantastic functionality. I call it best of show followed by the handheld 3M projector (that I will present in another blog).

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Wednesday night Harry B and I made our way to Columbia Tower in Downtown Seattle to learn about
building database centric apps on the Force.com platform.  If you are not familiar with Force.com
here is the skinny:

Force.com is the leading cloud platform for building business apps for all your business needs.
Many of you are familiar with Salesforce.com - the popular CRM tool.  Well Force.com extends
Salesforce.com's capabilities so that it is possible to build inventory apps, mobile apps...
Learn more - listen to Dave Carroll discuss the Force.com platform in this video:
 

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At last week’s busy election day D&H Mid-Atlantic Show in Hershey, I chatted with Michael Schwab, co-president at D&H. Interestingly, Michael and his brother Dan still “work the floor” which added a certain authenticity to the trade show featuring 800+ attendees and 160+ vendors.

One of the important aspects of our conversation concerned the cloud computing paradigm and its effect on distributors. Watch my video interview with Michael below where we quickly review the show-in-progress from the floor + discuss the cloud in 2011 (this starts about 2/3 of the way through the video).



Cloud + Distis
Seems to be a popular topic as today Joe Panettieri at MSP Mentor (www.mspmentor.net) has just published a story this morning HERE about Ingram Micro Cloud.
This solution has been launched with Ingram Micro VP Renee Bergeron being the point person. Readers will recall she recently stepped into the big shoes of Justin Crotty who moved on the run NetEnrich.


Does it all mean Disti Wars in the Cloud? Where’s Ronald Reagan when you need him to articulate a star wars defense shield? See his famous SDI speech from March 23k 1983 HERE.

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You know about VMWare, Microsoft’s VM, Parallel’s, Sun’s VirtualBox, however, you may not know who JumpBox is.  Jumpbox takes open source and some commercial apps and creates portable virtual machines that can be used across many of the VM platforms.  JumpBox VMs are a one file VM that expand to a directory and and are ready to use within minutes.  I’ve personally used JumpBox VMs for SugarCRM, a Wiki, and other core apps.

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