Normally when mentioned that the camera is connected to a computer network people tend to think of webcams, small, basic devices that connect to your computer used for chatting with your friends. This simply isn’t the case, with the advancement of camera technology picture definition has been vastly improved and impressive features added including::

• High Definition
• Thermal imaging
• Infra-Red imaging
• Facial recognition
• Automatic Number Plate Recognition
• PIR sensing
• LED lighting
• Motion detection

As these cameras are Ethernet based they can be easily incorporated into your existing network infrastructure to allow easier manageability, scalability, reliability and flexibility. Images can be backed up to a data store on your network or using Gardners service offerings, backup the images to us also ensuring that you always have a copy of your images.

Pilot Scheme

We have recently begun our trial scheme for our Axis offerings. During the past couple of weeks we have been contacted by some of the North-West’s largest companies interested in this technology and are piloting the cameras with them.

If you wish to get involved with this free of charge trial scheme, we have a range of IP cameras available suitable for any purpose. If you are considering replacing your current security cameras, installing new ones, or are simply interested in the technology and want to trial some IP cameras please just let me know.

Email: jasonf@gardsys.co.uk

Twitter: @enrjfitz

Phone: 0151 220 5552

Hi all, first blog post in a while (sorry!).

Just to remind all of you that were hot on the heels of downloading and installing Windows 7 RC (build 7100) – your time is almost up. Starting on 1st March 2010 users with this RC release will experience their machine shutting down every 2hrs, messages warning that the copy of Windows is not genuine.

On June 1, 2010, if you are still on the Windows 7 RC, your license will expire and the non-genuine experience will be triggered. Your wallpaper will be removed and "This copy of Windows is not genuine" will be displayed in the lower right corner of your desktop, above the taskbar. Starting on February 15, 2010, Windows 7 RC should actually start giving daily prompts to remind you about the expiration, but just in case two weeks’ notice isn’t enough, we’re letting you know a month in advance.

If you have enjoyed using Windows 7, upgrade to it! It’s brilliant!

Upgrade sooner rather than later to avoid issues in the future.

If YES: We can provide you with a free, no obligations competitive quotation.

Whether you’re satisfied with current arrangements or not, Gardner Systems can provide you with a fully comprehensive comparison that will outline not only what you will pay, but precisely the level of support you can expect. Find out how Gardners can assist you in achieving business goals as well as reducing IT costs.

If NO: We may be able to assist you in reaching business goals through enhanced efficiency of your IT giving you savings against your existing maintenance expenditure.

Either way, you have nothing to lose!!

Why not contact Gardner Systems and find out exactly how we can help you save money compared to your existing support costs.

Find out more here

Monday 7^th December – 9 a.m. until 11.30 a.m.

Gardner is please to present the first of our “No Brainer” IT consultancy days. Now that the worst of the recession is hopefully behind us, what are the obvious IT strategies and tactics we can adopt to improve and grow our businesses at last? Our presenters will be drawn from current industry leaders who will give you the best advice on how to get the best from your IT, with specific reference to the significant technology changes taking place in 2009/2010.

If you are just a bit confused or bewildered about what it all the challenges mean to you, then come along and have things explained simply. Our agenda will include:-

• Microsoft “The New Efficiency” including Virtualisation, Business Management
• NetApp Storage Efficient Technologies
• IBM Energy Efficiency Servers
• Hosted Services
• Cost Effective Security through IP cameras
• Power and cost saving tools including PC PowerDown and DocSense

The venue is the Blue Planet Aquarium in Ellesmere Port. The only sharks present will be those in the aquarium! Much of the advice offered on the day is around energy and cost saving, so we will all be doing a lot towards saving the planet. The session will finish around 11-30 am, leaving you plenty of time to network with the advisors or just take the opportunity to wander around Blue Planet and add to the enjoyment of your morning.

http://www.blueplanetaquarium.com

If you are interested in attending this event please register here

With our extensive LAN and WAN experience, it has been a straightforward step for us to add IP cameras to our portfolio of products and services. This has seen major results in one of our client IP camera sites being able to offer key assistance to Merseyside Police in combating a very serious crime. In due course we hope to offer more specific details to our clients for them to appreciate just how much more effective is this new technology compared to traditional CCTV systems. It is undoubtedly cheaper, more versatile and easier to deploy than traditional camera systems.

Axis offers the market’s broadest and most consistent range of high-quality network cameras including those suitable for indoor low light use, outdoor all weather models, Pan Tilt Zoom cameras and the latest PTZ High Definition cameras suitable for shopping centre security. We at Gardners have recently progressed through a proof-of-concept where the live images are streamed instantly to our Gardner Systems Cloud Storage to further protect the data being captured.

For more information, contact our technical sales team on 0151 220 5552 or email us at info@gardsys.co.uk.

As we have already announced, we are pleased to have SkillsGen on-site with us at our Wavertree offices.  Skills-Gen is a Microsoft Gold partner and one of the leading training companies in the North-West.  Gardner has an agreed bespoke and also an off-the-shelf training programme for all users. We cater for users who wish to do anything from just familiarising themselves with the new Microsoft technologies up to obtaining professional certified qualifications.  We can jointly agree work “coaching” and enterprise-wide certification.

Following our latest series of Microsoft events covering Windows 7, Exchange 2010 and Microsoft Server 2008 R2 we are pleased to announce that we can now offer training on these subjects.

For a detailed response to your own specific requirements, just call our technical sales team on 0151 220 5552 or email us at info@gardsys.co.uk.

George McCann of Regenda Group has done just that, using Microsoft Hyper-V, System Centre Virtual Machine Manager and his NetApp storage solution, to build a business continuity solution for one of their key business applications.

George shared with us the business issue and how he used his technology investment to help address it. “As a Housing group our ability to manage our housing stock and provide an excellent service to our customers is key and our system for delivering that is critical to our ability to operate. As a business we identified that we needed to provide a recovery solution should we ever lose our primary data centre and our housing management system with it”

Regenda Group has multiple sites alongside their main site in Bolton, on e of those is in Liverpool and had been identified as their secondary data centre.

George continued “ we realised the key to this was to utilise our secondary data centre, but also look at how the technology we were using allowed us to do this simply. We currently are using replication technology to have copies of our data sat in the secondary site, we have taken advantage of technology inherent in our applications, such as “site continuous replication” in Exchange 2007 or SnapMirror on our NetApp storage, however the challenge presented by our housing management system was that it didn’t easily offer us this”.

This led George to have to consider how he could take advantage of his existing platforms to add replication and DR functionality to his housing management system “ we had two issues with the system, one was it had no inherent DR capabilities and two, it was running on older hardware, which was going to be difficult to replace if we lost it. Because of this, it seemed an ideal solution to virtualise, initially we had considered VMWare as a mechanism for this, but with the help from our technology partners at Gardner Systems and the close link they have helped us to forge with technology specialist such as Matt McSpirit at Microsoft, we quickly realised that Hyper-V especially alongside Systems Centre Virtual Machine Manager, would be the perfect solution for us”.

George goes on to explain “the mix of technology, from Microsoft and NetApp has allowed us to easily provide a twofold solution, firstly by using VMM’s physical to virtual migration technology, we have been able to easily create a virtual version of our live housing management system, utilising the flexibility of our NetApp storage, we could easily then copy live production data into our isolated DR instance, allowing us to test the solution, without impinging on the production environment. By then placing the Hyper-V virtual machine files onto our NetApp storage, we can then use the SnapMirror functionality to replicate these virtual servers to our DR environment, which we can then easily mount on our DR Hyper-V hosts”.

George plans to enhance this further “by presenting to the production server storage from our NetApp SAN, we will then get our housing management system to put its own system backups there, on completion of this, we will then get the NetApp storage to replicate the data over to our DR site, we can then mount this data on our DR site and import it into the recovered version of our system”

“ it’s great to see our technology investment providing us functionality that we had not even thought about when we deployed it, that really shows how the right technology platform gives you tremendous scope and flexibility for your business to be able to meet new challanges.

To this end a number of our clients had met with us to discuss how we could help them build a continuity model, that in the event that they could not access their normal business premises then how could we help them to implement a solution to allow their businesses to continue

We have just completed a pilot solution with one of those clients to prove just how we can use their technology investment to create such a continuity solution.

As this is a pilot solution and of a sensitive nature, we are not able to share the client’s details with you, however we can share the technology approach and how we have used NetApp storage and virtualisation to give a continuity solution.

The current client setup includes a number of physical servers, providing a number of services, such as email and database facilities, internal storage is delivered using NetApp’s unified storage platform, presenting both user data via NAS and storage to the server infrastructure via a SAN.

The aim was to provide two key components;

· To provide a remote “backup” of their live data both application and user data, which would be no more than 4 hours out of date from the production environment.

· To allow in the event of their main business headquarters been inaccessible to have key business staff setup at Gardner Systems Offices and access a replicated version of their current business environment, including applications and data.

To provide this we were going to take advantage primarily of the NetApp storage they had invested in, using NetApp’s SnapMirror technology, we would be able to replicate their business data to a secondary NetApp storage solution in a secure location, using a simple encrypted connection across the Internet. Utilising NetApp’s snapshot technology and SnapManager application suite, we would be able to take consistent instantaneous backups and replicate them to the secondary storage, without affecting production data.

This alone provided and met the first requirement which was to provide a live disk based “off site” backup of the production data.

The Second challenge was to replicate the production server environment allowing users to access their data and business applications from a secondary location, should their production office no longer be available.

Again we have utilised technology to make this straightforward by taking advantage of Microsoft Hyper-V server, we were able to build a virtualised replica of the production servers, allowing users to turn up with their laptops, or virtualised desktops if required to allow them to Logon to the system they would normally see in the office.

This allows us to store all of the users physical devices, on a single virtual server, which then only need bringing online for testing, or in the event of an actual continuity incident, reducing the client costs as there is no need to charge them for the maintenance of physical machines.

We have provided them with a per Gb/Pre month cost model for hosting a copy of their data, again removing the investment they would have to make in both owning, hosting and operating their own secondary storage solution.

We are now looking to formalise the procedure and service level agreements with this customer, in what is a very exciting new area for us and providing an invaluable service to Merseyside’s business community.

To find out more about how this pilot has worked and the technology used to do it, contact pauls@gardnersystems.co.uk

Our Network Manager Alan Eves said “ we have been so impressed with the quality of the products, but more importantly with the efficiency is running costs and importantly business practices that these new products are bringing to us”

Alan has been involved in transforming a number of the day to day operations at Gardner by heading up a SharePoint roll out across the business, “this has revolutionised the way Gardner interact with not only each other, but also our customers and event attendees”. As part of the new technology migration Gardner are looking to enhance their event management and customer interation further by deploying Microsoft CRM.

Other technology products currently rolling out across the business include;

· Windows 7 on all desks

· Server virtualisation programme, using Microsoft Hyper-V and managed with the System Centre Toolset (Virtual Machine Manger, operations manager and config manager)

· Exchange 2010

· Online Services (integrating on premise solutions with online Exchange, OCS and Live Meeting)

“these technologies are transforming the way we are operating out business, as an example the deployment of Hyper-V R2 is going to greatly reduce the physical server count, reducing both out power and cooling requirements” Alan Added.

Alongside the Microsoft technology, Gardner are also taking advantage of their NetApp storage platform as well, to allow for a hugely efficient delivery mechanism for their new virtualised infrastructure . “The NetApp storage technology is very important in our virtualisation programme, we believe it bar far the most efficient storage technology on the market, with its deduplication and cloning technology, allowing both massive space savings as well as incredibly efficient machine creation, letting us create new Windows servers in a matter of a couple of minutes. Both technologies have positively impacted what we are doing, allowing us to be much more cost and time efficient” Alan Added.

If you want to see more about what Gardner’s are doing, contact Alan to arrange a demo alane@gardnersystems.co.uk

We wanted to find out how good the price changes where, in short…fantastic! for example a FAS 2020 (NetApp entry level model) with 12 x 500Gb SATA drives is now less that £9,000, that’s about 1/2 the price they had been previously!

We think this brings NetApp’s outstanding and versatile technology right into the reach of  Small to Medium businesses, who want to see their business data more effectively managed.

 These pricing changes are on the FAS2000 series and announced by NetApp in the following Press Report.

“NetApp Expands Offering for Midsize Enterprise Customers with New Entry-Level Storage System and Aggressive New Entry Price Points

New FAS2040 Adds Increased Capacity and Performance to Award-Winning Family; FAS2020, with Its Reduced Price, Is Now More Attractive to Smaller IT Organizations

SUNNYVALE, Calif.—September 15, 2009— Showing its commitment to Midsize Enterprise and distributed enterprise customers, NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today announced the new FAS2040 storage system, providing customers with increased performance and capacity to handle demanding Microsoft® Windows® consolidation and virtualization workloads all on the same system. NetApp also announced significant price reductions for its FAS2020 systems and associated software, which are now preconfigured with high-capacity drives and include all protocols. These systems provide excellent value for midsize customers while enabling channel partners to sell into a broader customer base.”

Good move NetApp.

The Full Official NetApp Press Release