May 2013
1 post
1 tag
10 Things a Start-up should look for in a Cloud...
(Question originally posed on NY Fintech Start-ups meetup.com page - 05/12/2013) Here is our short list 1. Where does the cloud provider host the systems? A good cloud provider should be happy to take you on a tour of the facility or at least provide you with documentation about the facilities, such as SAS-16 SOC certification. 2. Are the cloud virtual instances portable to another cloud? Does the...
December 2012
1 post
2012 in review: The "Living backup" is now the IT...
Affirmed Systems is a real-time managed services provider that monitors, detects and alerts on customer performance metrics 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
The history of backups
Data backups for many years have been static, or monolithic copies of production systems taken at scheduled intervals. Often backups were stored on magnetic tape for easy offsite archival, or on dedicated appliances....
August 2012
2 posts
Why we dont do Dell - A horror story from a...
We worked with the Channel sales team out of Austin, TX last year… we ordered six figures of dell servers, san and MS licensing… we received the wrong san and our client was livid - they only had the week of 10/31/2011 to get a migration done and ordering the equipment 9/18 we were told no problem to have it delivered by the second week of October - very stock environment - nothing...
12 questions any company should ask a managed...
Affirmed Systems is a managed data center provider that specializes in hosting financial trading and real-time sensitive customers at Equinix, including disaster recovery facilities for customers with primary data centers currently at in-office facilities.
Recently, we spoke with a start-up firm that was considering quotes from several other data center providers. After reviewing these quotes...
July 2012
1 post
Does a "Shared Nothing Architecture" make vmware's...
This month we are in the middle of a data center consolidation and architecture clean up for a new customer that has “gotten by” on vmware free edition, open source distributions of Linux at their Data Center and a few Amazon EC2 instances in the cloud for some time…
When putting together the budget for their technology roadmap, we stopped to reassess what version of vmware we...
April 2012
2 posts
What is a Managed Services Provider?
There seems to be a lot of confusion about what a Managed Services Provider (MSP) is! Some people think it’s a vendor manager. Some people think its a group that runs software agents on the workstations and servers at customer’s offices. Still others, think MSP’s continually backup all the Company’s data to “the cloud” and can quickly and painlessly recover any...
Are you getting the performance from your network...
Networks can be both a cash cow to companies that optimize them or a tar pit of wasted time to companies that do not understand why things are “slow” or “unresponsive”.
Affirmed Systems is a managed services and Data center hosting firm that is the industry leader at analyzing network performance metrics and dash boarding out how your network is working.
Here are some of...
March 2012
1 post
Top 10 things a great Data Center Manager will do
What does it take to be a Data Center manager with real-time responsibilities, supporting the hardware, systems, software and network performance critical to an organization?
I thought I would share the list of top 10 things we are focused on in our Data Center management team and to hear some more great ideas and feedback from other Data Center managers!
1. Use multiple systems to monitor. No...
September 2011
2 posts
More cases of ISP google Hijacking (9/23)...
Please review this link -
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/07/widespread-search-hijacking-in-the-us
Many ISP’s are redirecting your google.com DNS result to the IP Address of their “Paxfire” proxy server – effectively letting them record EVERY search term you Google for marketing or other invasive reasons.
This happens because most home users just use their ISP’s DNS servers and don’t think...
HSRP active router tells standby to take over when...
One cool fact I thought I would share – Understanding the HSRP resign message…
This evening I’m testing various failover scenarios and I have my primary (HSRP active) router (.2) the HSRP primary (for .1) on an external segment (where 2 ASA’s default to the HSRP virtual address (.11 , .10)
I don’t use standby tracking on the primary router – it’s simply tracking its local ISP connection default...
August 2011
1 post
What planning goes into an "Actionable Disaster...
“Mission Protect” Background
Affirmed Systems designs and manages on-going disaster recovery environments for our Managed IT Services customers. The goal of this service is for clients to resume work in only a few minutes in the event their primary applications such as voice, email, financial applications, payroll and any business critical system are effected in an Emergency or outage...
July 2011
2 posts
6 tags
Affirmed Systems Managed IT Services Summer 2011... →
Managed IT Services First month Free! Comprehensive Coverage includes: Monitoring, Maintenance, data backups and support.
8 tags
Does your company have a Datacenter? Datacenter... →
“Our customers bask in uptime, reliability and insight their competitors can only dream of” Joseph Brunner, CEO, CCIE 19366
June 2011
1 post
IT Decisions faced by our customers...
As our customers build their business from an idea, to a small group to a larger corporation they are faced with many technology decisions. Some they face the day they incorporate. Some they may not face for many years and will rely on their “TRUSTED ADVISER” to make for them when they are ready…
So here are the top technology decisions our clients need to make and the pro’s and con’s of...
January 2011
1 post
Affirmed Systems 2011 sales specials announced
Affirmed Systems 2011 sales specials announced
News Release
Source: Affirmed Systems Communications Director
On Thursday, January 27, 2011, 9:00 am EDT
NEW YORK, January 27, 2011— Affirmed Systems, the leading Managed IT Services firm, has announced 2011 sales specials designed to further accelerate competition and cost savings in the IT services industry. Affirmed Systems is...
December 2010
2 posts
Guys that "know cisco" but say "the certs just...
Ever wonder why getting vendor Certifications in Cisco, Microsoft, VMWare etc. are so important to your career as IT engineer?
Certifications with no Experience is of course bad! You need real experience working in the field to have at least a good understanding of how something works.
But often, experience with no certifications can be just as bad. Just because someone is...
Configuring SNMP for monitoring on ESXi 4.1
If you’re like most people you use the free edition of ESXi 4.1 server. Why not?
Most small businesses and companies do not need live motion, storage v-motion, and DRS and can live with a few minutes of downtime if an ESX server crashes (how often does this happen? LOL). The VMware licenses often cost more than the physical servers and therefore are out of reach of all but the plushest...
October 2010
2 posts
Understanding Cisco ASA firewall VPN tunnels (keep...
To continue our simplified vpn tunnel series, this time we are looking at Cisco ASA firewall vpn tunnels.
Here’s our basic config
ASA’s use nat 0 statements to bypass nat for traffic using the vpn tunnel.
! dont forget to deny nat for the private to private in your nat acl access-list no-nat extended permit ip 192.168.1.0 255.255.255.0 192.168.2.0 255.255.255
(where...
Issues with multiple users connecting to cisco...
The scenario:
Recently, several of our clients have had issues when multiple staff members are working off-site at third-party locations. While on-site the users all connect back to our their vpn gateway via the Cisco IPSEC vpn client.
-Only 1 user at a time can connect to the Cisco IPSEC vpn client service.
-If a second user connects the first user’s vpn client is disconnected….
...
September 2010
1 post
Know when your vpn tunnels are down - configure...
1. First let’s define some global variables the router will need to lookup the smtp relay’s address when sending email alerts (in our case we use Postini) ip domain-lookup ip name-server 4.2.2.2 2. Let’s get the sendmail.tcl script onto the local router’s flash. EEM applets will use this TCL script to send the actual alerts (script courtesy of and available on cisco.com)
...
Understanding Cisco IOS VPN tunnels (keep it...
Many times our Cisco Managed Services clients need a quick IOS tunnel for a new extranet or wan connection.
Here’s our basic config (note: the MTU gotcha - having this fixed really helps performance over the tunnel especially with MS RDP traffic)
! dont forget to deny nat for the private to private in your nat acl ip access-list ext nat-permit deny ip...
August 2010
2 posts
4 tags
Using the BurFlags Registry key to rebuild the...
This week a customer’s domain controller had a stale sysvol share and ntfrs events in the registry were showing problems replicating.
After researching the issue we found this Microsoft KB article;
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290762
We decided on doing a non-authoritative restore. After modifying the registry key and restarting the ntfrs service - voila! Problem Solved!
Let’s...
