Planning

6 posts

Virtual Machines Are Not Free

Alex Bakman, founder and CEO of VKernel writes an excellent paper on evaluating costs of virtual machines titled, “Virtual Machines Are Not Free”. You can read the report at Vkernel’s site.

I never fail to be amazed at the notion some business owners ferverently hold to, that one copy of software entitles one to install it as many times one wants to, totally in violation of the software’s licensing. I’ve witnesed multiple server instances as well as multiple desktops installed under one license within a business that I would normally think would have a high level of integrity.

The trick to virtualization lies in ones ability to “fit more VMs per physical server, fit more VMs per physical server, correctly size storage and memory and CPU for each VM”. VKernel sells the tools to get the job done.

That’s right, the tools are not free

No evaluation of virtualization gains any validity without truthfully considering software’s real licensing costs, correct sizing for the composite number of virtual machines initially deployed within a high performance metric and projected scaling of the virtual environment within a selected time frame.

Yes, it takes more math than just figuring out how big a hard drive you might need in five years and whether or not you can get away with using one Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 license for twenty virtual servers.

Virtual QuickBooks Multi User Into The Cloud

Business Systems Support Planning QuickBooks

Extending our understanding of routine software tools such as QuickBooks Multi User sets the stage for us to profit from new technologies. Most of us know the QuickBooks icon well. Our common frame of reference allows us to explore over-used, over-hyped technology terms like virtual computing, virtualization, cloud computing, cloud services and the cloud, in a way that guides us to a solid business decision.

In an article I wrote for my business, the last server you will ever need may very well be the server that contains your QuickBooks multi user application. I’ll show you one way that QuickBooks might be moved into the Cloud, explaining the terminology as we go. Consider this pathway as evolving from one configuration to the next logical step and so on. Chances are, your QuickBooks environment may reflect one on the steps along the path. Also consider that the entire point of this exercise, to replace the high cost of local infrastructure with the low cost of cloud resources motivates our journey down this path.

You may not be using QuickBooks in your business, but you probably understand that networked QuickBooks multi user requires networked server or desktop resources to share company files with other computers that have QuickBooks installed on them. Larger QuickBooks environments can have as many as thirty users. So you may have something like this illustration with PC1 hosting QuickBooks company files for PC2 through however many computers you have QuickBooks installed on.

Now, consider the very next step. Suppose you’ve reached the point in your business that you have more than a few users, you also have some automation going on with QuickBooks, you’ve purchased my “Build Your Own QuickBooks Production Server” book and you’ve replaced PC1 with a QuickBooks server. You now have the classic QuickBooks client/server environment that the majority of businesses find themselves inextricably bound to. That may sound negative, but it’s predicated on a business decision. Perhaps the classic QuickBooks client/server environment returns the best benefit for your investment.

Or, perhaps you require several servers, one for QuickBooks, one for your Goldmine CRM system and one for your email system. Enter virtual computing and virtualization, a popular “new” systems concept that’s been around for many, many years. I explored the costs of virtualization in a previous post.

Essentially, virtualization uses massive physical resources to create virtual resources. In other words, use one server to create three virtual servers. Then, instead of using three physical servers for your QuickBooks, Goldmine and email, you can use one physical server, much like this illustration.

The point of my previous post focuses on cost and how very difficult it becomes to make a business case for virtual computing and virtualization. But if you can make the business case, then by all means, utilize virtualization in your business, which brings us to the next step in our journey down this path.

Consider for a moment that your new massive physical server, now the most mission critical physical device in your inventory of business tools requires a more stable physical environment in which to operate and your employees desperately need remote access to QuickBooks, Goldmine and email from home and at customer locations.

Your choices require you to make software changes and place your hardware into a data center environment, either in your present offices or a datacenter. You’ve now entered a world of remote services utilizing Internet communications resources to access QuickBooks, Goldmine and email.

You own the server and other hardware as well as the hardware life cycle that dictates periodic replacement. You pay the monthly datacenter charges and equipment notes. You’re responsible to your employees, customers and vendors for uptime and service quality, even though you may have hired several IT people to keep things running. You know the costs and you’ve carefully considered ROI. You continue to pay for your computing resources 24/7 whether your employees, customers and vendors utilize them or not.

So, I want to introduce a new notion. Cloud computing covers a lot of ground, but the primary distinction rests with money. It’s a pay as you go program and has much in common with time shared computing introduced in the 1960s. You pay for only the computing resources that you use, and you can scale up or down as needed. “The very concept of cloud computing, and of cloud services, has been a long time in the making” but the name’s not important, the concept is. Yes, it’s datacenter and Internet based computing, using terminal services, web applications and Internet communications, but so is your own datacenter focused, virtualized computing environment.

So let’s unwind a bit. Some new ROI calculations comparing your own datacenter focused, virtualized computing environment and a Cloud computing environment are in order. Focus on the primary distinction of Cloud computing, paying for only the computing resources that you use, and scalability as needed.

Consider the three simple business necessities from the examples I’ve used above; accounting, CRM and email. Although your situation differs from my example, the logic aligns. QuickBooks alternatives exist, anywhere from utilizing RackSpace Windows Server instances to various QuickBooks hosted solutions certified by Intuit. CRM from 37signals continually receives rave reviews and easily replaces Goldmine. Email lives anywhere from an Amazon server instance or a cheap BlueHost web hosting account to a hosted Exchange Server account from Intermedia.

Research your own alternatives. You could save a boat load of money, returning it straight to the bottom line.

Secret To Twitter Marketing

Business Systems Support Marketing Planning

Read “A Start-Up’s Tale, Tweet by Tweet” at WSJ

Print “A Start-Up’s Tale, Tweet by Tweet” as a PDF and save it where you can find it again.

Research, research and research some more.

Read “A Start-Up’s Tale, Tweet by Tweet” at WSJ again.

Plan, plan and plan some more.

Read “A Start-Up’s Tale, Tweet by Tweet” at WSJ the third time.

If you didn’t learn anything new after the third read, execute your plan.

Otherwise, revise your plan, then execute your plan.

Read “A Start-Up’s Tale, Tweet by Tweet” at WSJ for extra motivation.

Work, work and work some more.

Read “A Start-Up’s Tale, Tweet by Tweet” at WSJ for additional motivation.

Continue working, enjoy and measure.

Disclaimer: I’m on my second reading.

Refuse To Participate In The Recession

Planning

This is a reprint of an email I received from Leo Quinn in New York. I’ve been promoting his program “How To Own Your Paycheck Again!“, on some of my other websites. I wish I could give a copy to everyone. Lord knows, we need it.

“NINE SIMPLE IDEAS FOR COPING WITH FINANCIAL STRESS”

In stressful financial times the media likes to remind us of other stressful times in our history. When I look at those past recessions that happened when I was a functioning member of society (a.k.a. an adult) I am struck by the fact that I don’t ever remember being aware of them. If I was aware of them at the time they didn’t scar me for life.

Here are 9 ideas to help you cope better with your financial stress in the hopes that this recession will be a soon forgotten memory for you.

1) TURN OFF AND TUNE OUT

Author Barry Neil Kaufman says “We stare bug-eyed at the eleven o’clock news, striving to be well informed, as if knowledge of the latest disasters will enhance our sense of well-being.”

Why do you need to watch or listen to the news? Very few people NEED to get their information this way. Short of a tornado headed to your house, you can live your life quite nicely without 24/7 news. Try it for a week and see what happens.

2) IT WILL NOT LAST FOREVER

Og Mandino is his book “The Greatest Salesman in the World” gave four words that “have been passed down from the ancients that will carry me through every adversity and maintain my life in balance. These four words are: This too shall pass.”

He’s right. It WILL pass and 5 or 10 years from today we’ll be reading about this in the paper and we’ll think…”oh yeah, I remember that” and it will make a great story to tell your kids or grandkids.

Who said it?…”the only difference between “tragedy” and comedy is time”

3) ZIP IT!

Quit yapping about the economy to everyone you meet. Pity parties help no one on any subject so keep the complaining to a minimum. And don’t hang around people who insist on wallowing in all the negativity.

Ed Diener, author of Happiness, Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth, says “It’s not that you shouldn’t think about (the economic crisis) but think about it to the extent that you can control it. Put your money places where you are comfortable, deal with it and move forward.”

4) LAUGH!

Since 1922 Reader’s Digest has been telling us that laughter is the best medicine. Take daily laugh breaks. It’s so easy with the internet. Go to www.Youtube.com and search for “game show bloopers” and you’ll be laughing AND feeling smarter in seconds. Family Feud and The Newlywed Game bloopers are my favorites.

You can find Saturday Night Live and Mad TV clips all over the internet. Many cartoons, full length movies and sitcoms can be viewed in their entirety at www.Hulu.com

5) FACE YOUR FINANCES

They won’t get better by ignoring them. They won’t go away. Your credit score might be hurt if you can’t pay your bills or your get behind but you won’t go to debtor’s prison.

It’s no fun jumping every time the phone rings for fear it’s a creditor. If you need help in the U.S., visit www.NFCC.org the National Foundation for Credit Counseling. Don’t deal with any organization that promises to help you with your finances that doesn’t get a link from this website.

The specific page on that site where you can find local help is:

http://www.debtadvice.org/takethefirststep/locator.cfm

If you can pay all your debts on time now and you don’t have a plan to pay them off much faster, use my plan.

Over 18,000 people in the last 4 years have made the investment in “How To Own Your Paycheck Again!”

6) KEEP TRACK

Be ruthless in tracking your spending and income. By ruthless I mean keep track of every penny. We all have a problem with “mental accounting.” We don’t look at 50 cents as real money and thus would likely not even consider tracking expenses that small. Fifty cents a day over a year is $182.50. It really does add up.

Keeping track of all your spending can be an eye-opening experience. You’ll often discover unnecessary waste that is easy to fix.

7) GO FOR A ONE MINUTE WALK

It’s been proven that those who regularly exercise have lower stress levels than those who don’t.

In his book, “One Small Step Can Change Your Life – The Kaizen Way”, Robert Maurer, Ph.D. states that the part of our brain called the “amygdala”… “sets off alarm bells whenever we want to make a departure from our usual, safe routines. The brain is designed that way so that any new challenge or opportunity or desire triggers some degree of fear”

He suggests we take VERY small steps so as not to “wake up” our amygdala. My favorite example in the book was a client he wanted to march in place, in front of the TV for one minute a day. That would be her exercise routine. Just one minute.

Eventually she marched for 3 minute commercial breaks and then for whole shows.

“Soon her ridiculously small actions had grown into the firm habit of running one mile each day. Note that this gradual buildup to a steady program is the exact opposite of the usual pattern, in which a person starts off with ÿa burst of activity for a few weeks, but then returns to a comfortable spot on the couch”

8) START ANOTHER INCOME STREAM

People who work 9-5 and do nothing else to earn money have always perplexed me.

They get up every day, shower, drive to work, work, drive home, do whatever they do at home, go to bed and start it over again every day for 40 years.

At home they worry about job security, promotions, raises, benefits and the like but they do little if anything to ensure their own future, content to rely on an employer who may or may not be around in 5 years.

Spend some of your worry time researching ways to make extra money. Any bookstore or library will have many books on the subject.

Get your children involved. Make it a partnership. What an incredible gift to give your children. The gift of independence.

Yes, there may be laws and rules and regulations you need to follow but don’t let those stop you. They are many resources available to help.

Start at the small business administration. www.SBA.gov and also check out SCORE at www.score.org

9) PLAY THE LOTTERY!

No, not the state lottery, also known as “a tax on people bad at math”. I’m talking about the comptroller’s office lottery. Every state has an office that handles what are known as ‘Unclaimed Funds” or “Unclaimed Property”. In NY it’s called the Comptroller’s Office. Other states give it various names. Unclaimed funds are forgotten bank deposits, tax refunds, and security deposits from landlords and utility companies to name a few.

Most amounts are very small but it’s still fun to search. You can search the databases online. Most won’t tell you how much is owed but some will give you a range. Search for your name and the names of all your friends and relatives in whatever states they live.

When you find some money that is owed, point your friend or relative to the appropriate website and collect the gratitude (and hopefully a finders fee!) Soon you’ll feel like Santa at Christmas handing out wads of cash.

The site to begin your search is:

http://www.FindLostMoneyHere.com

So there are nine ideas for you to try. None of them are hard and most you’ll find rather fun. Turn off the TV and the radio…ignore the nattering nabobs of negativity and live a less stressful and more peaceful life.

**************************

Leo Quinn is a financial educator from Upstate NY. Since 1997 he has helped over 18,000 people from around the world, through his live workshops and website, get better control of their finances and pay off their debts much faster than normal.

Learn more at www.leoquinn.com

Green With Envy?

Planning

I came to an interest in technology along the same path that many people my age traversed. We witnessed the first manned space flights as well as the evolution of electronics from vacuum tubes to transistors. I once received a stern warning as well as a low grade on a speech I gave in the fourth grade regarding the miniaturization of electrical and mechanical components in the future. Seems that my compulsion to rant on about miniature components was more than my speech teacher could handle, or perhaps it was the lack of note cards.

One of the most interesting mechanical / electrical things I came across back then were several Popular Science articles about generating my own electricity and selling it back to the electric company. Although these articles were “survivalist” in nature, the notion of getting paid for my electricity was quite cool. Not to mention, I was not interested in packing away instant dried food, gold and vast amounts of 50 caliber machine gun ammunition.

Looks like we’ve come full circle. One of the remarkable “home” engineers I enjoyed reading about, Ed Fowler has an entirely new opportunity for you and I to “give back” to the electric company.

You will really enjoy Ed and his website EfficientPlanet.com

It’s The Hose, Stupid.

Planning

On any given sunny day during the early 1970s, you would most likely find me on one of many thousands of construction job sites in the booming Houston Texas area, plying my trade as a concrete pump operator. In those days, there were probably less than thirty concrete pumps in the entire southeast Texas area.

Concrete pumping just began its trek to become a valid concrete placement technique in the construction industry. Pioneers like myself and many others slid into a routine of pump all day and repair all night, just to make it to the next job. Convincing an entire construction industry about the merits of pumping concrete obsessed us to the extreme.

Safety occupied only the most remote corner of our new industry, surfacing only when one of us were severely injured. After all, we were just beginning to figure out what might go wrong.

My first memory involving a concrete pump and boom combination reflects regaining consciousness after the momentary impact of a high pressure steel braided concrete hose knocked me thirty feet from the location of the pump. In those days, we mounted heavy steel braided hoses at the articulating joints of booms used to place concrete and at the tip of the boom, unlike today where you will see only one hose mounted to the end of the boom.

The majority of my concrete placing jobs during the 70s required me to carry 300 feet of placing pipe and hose at all times. Typically, the boom dropped into the slab where a single steel braided hose connected to several sections of pipe and hose with the hose configured in a smooth curve between boom and pipe. As the pour worked back to the pump, I cleaned and loaded all of the pipe and hose, and I raised the boom above the pour to complete the work. I would also frequently place concrete into wall forms by suspending hose above the wall, while a hose man controlled the fine movements of the hose.

Fast forward to today where the end of today’s long booms becomes home to a good “hose man” with the compulsion to place over 150 yards of concrete per hour. One can imagine the force that a solid stream of liquid concrete leaving the end of a five-inch hose at the tip of a placing boom 200 feet from a modern concrete pump’s hopper generates. Compared to the “old days”, we were lucky to sustain half of today’s volume and a “long boom” stretched out less than 100 feet.

The traditional 70s configuration of a steel braided double ended boom tip hose married to the high volume long booms of today translates into one of the most dangerous self perpetuating scenarios in concrete placing activities. Common practice finds concrete pump booms fitted with a heavy double-ended hose with the potential to severally hurt workers in close proximity the hose during concrete pumping.

On occasion, workers have lost their lives, injured by the spontaneous rapid motion of the hose during an air or materials plug discharge. Imagine being clubbed in the head by several hundred pounds of metal hurled with tons of force generated in a momentary burst of energy. In the industry, it’s called “hose whipping”. It can happen with any boom size and at any pumping velocity.

We all know the difficulty of changing our habits. Looking back to the 70s, I never gave the heavy double-ended hose a second thought. It was the way concrete pumping was done. I’m proud of the ground I helped break in the 70s, but I wish I had seen the heavy double-ended hose issue coming. I’ve long since left the concrete pumping business for other construction challenges; however, recent changes in the industry spurred me to reflect on this concrete pumping practice long considered the norm.

Today, with the construction industry so fluid and under so much economic pressure, concrete pumps change ownership repeatedly and new inexperienced people find themselves in the business of pumping concrete. My message to everyone involved with concrete pumping; please change your thinking about heavy double-ended hoses now, before the next person finds them self in the hospital over an accident facilitated by one of these hoses.

ConcretePumping.com, a website run by Todd Bullis, serves a community of concrete pump operators and owners. Discussions about the merits of using special boom tip hoses frequent the website. Owners and operators alike express concerns about using heavy double-ended hoses in the wrong situation. However, they also express concern about the large number of construction people that don’t yet understand the danger posed by an old, outdated way of doing things.

Think about a safer way to place concrete with a boom. It’s not the 70s. If you own concrete pump and placing booms, invest in the new lightweight tip hoses. If you operate a concrete pump or placing boom, take a moment to change out the heavy double-ended hose for the new lightweight tip hose before you raise the boom over a hose man’s head. The lives of the people under your boom depend on it.

Concrete Pumping