We have a booth at the Pete & C Conference February 9th and 10th. We are partnering this year with Rudy from Astaro and Mike from SMC Networks. We will be presenting several of our major communications solutions.

SMC Networks is a solid alternative to both infrastructure and security access technologies. The company was started by a couple of ex-Cisco employees and provides many of the products that Cisco has made famous for much more reasonable prices. If you need to control your network access you will find a product in the SMC product line that will meet your needs. Be sure to stop by  Booth 100 and talk to Mike. He will be more than happy to discuss with you the capabilities of SMC Products and how they will benefit you. Mike is one of SMC’s excellent design engineers and will be able to discuss almost any situation that you may wish to present.

Rudy Ricci will be working our booth with us as well representing Astaro Internet Security. Astaro’s Products have won many industry awards with their unique approach to providing a network secure environment. The Flagship product, the Astaro Security Gateway, is one of several products that you can use to help you to secure your network from remote attacks as well as a first line defense against virus, spyware, phishing and spam attacks.

Other products that we will be presenting will feature our line of Intel Based workstations and notebook solutions, Aruba wireless networking products, Symantec Software and Hardware Solutions, Microsoft and Intel Modular Server Technology. We have some very interesting installations that have used the Intel Modular Server (IMS) Technology as a center piece of the solutions. Be sure to talk to one of our System Specialists about how you can use this technology in your district.

See you on Monday!

Bob Appleby

We have made our first foray into VOIP market with Syspine’s Response Point System. We are setting up our system  using Syspine’s DOS-A50 4 Port System and 16 phones. It gave us the opportunity to upgrade our Switches with SMC’s Programmable units. We placed a POE switch to support our upstairs systems and to power our phones over the Ethernet connections. We want to try the phones in line with our computer connections to see if there is any significant traffic increase (which translates to network slowdown) with the addition of the new units. When you consider adding 16 new devices to the network infrastructure it is quite possible that there might be some change in how the network functions. It is going to be another week before the system goes into full production and we really see what kind of traffic is generated.

The reason we jumped so quickly on this change in our infrastructure was caused by our focusing on the renewal contract from our current phone line provider. They were requesting that we sign a new contract for a new contract that would lock us in to a two year period to gain a certain rate. We were not very happy at that cost and so we decided to look for alternatives. Since part of our business is providing business class phone systems we have a lot of resources to choose from and the one that looked the most promising to us was converting our standard phone service (PSTN) to digital IP Trunk Line Service. The cost savings is tremendous. We plan on retaining two PSTN lines for backup and for other primary services (Fax, Credit Card and Emergency Services) our primary phone service will now be through the internet. Our provider Packet8 is giving us 12 lines and with the cost of the two PSTN lines we are keeping, we will have about a $500 per month savings by moving to the new service. With the cost of the Syspine equipment purchase we will be able to upgrade our phone system and have it pay for itself from the savings inside of one year. Now part of the reason the savings was so great is the number of lines that we are using but even for a smaller installation your cost savings could be just as significant.

Over the next month I will be documenting different aspects of our new system and how we integrate it into the way we do business. I will talk about the IP Trunking Technology and how it has worked for us and some of the other products that are available for the system that you might want to consider. So be sure to come back to site to see how we are progressing and hear about what tweaks we have to make to get the system to perform to our requirements. I will be posting more detailed configuration information both on our Solutions Pages and creating a configurator on our Products Pages. For now,  let me give you some system specs of what we are using and what the system can do. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate contacting me.

Bob Appleby