Regular visitors to the security industry tradeshow which is held annually in Sydney have commented that the tradeshow is getting bigger year by year and that the displays have become more complex and mind boggling.  The writer decided to take a look of this engineering segment called building services management in the tradeshow held in Darling Harbour in early September. 

The writer was shocked and impressed with the state of developments.  Physical real estate access control (not computer firewall), fire alarming (not anti-virus), intruder detection (yes they are Hackers and Trojans), and various bits and pieces have now been integrated with video surveillance to a certain extent in one single computer system.

All top world vendors were represented in the tradeshow.  The writer took a count and found that Europe based vendors were dominant whereas America based vendors were far and few in between.  USA has led in IT industry development especially from the Silicon Valley.  People there are busy working on a new business model called Cloud Computing.  Europeans continue to stay down to earth and have managed to become leaders in transforming physical security system technologies while USA dominates in the clouds.  The Microsoft and Intel of the physical security industry are Europeans in Denmark & Sweden respectively.  

Every organization whether it is a business, school or non-profit making entity has a budget and the manager has the responsibility of making all ends meet.  Many business advisers have advocated deploying technologies to reduce costs.  In doing so, managers have incurred the costs of employing IT people and the gap of IT literacy may lead some into black holes surrendering some control away to IT people.  This is not necessary.  Assume that we do not know why “IP is Everything”.  We just need to know that business dictates the deployment of technology and not the other way round.  Below is an example of what to do.

We want to employ a new staff member.  To do it professionally, we draft a position spec, a personal spec, and various documents that would help give us confidence that the chosen people would be the most suitable person for the job.  We then post the information on a website that specialises in staff recruitment; the price is $200 say for one month of advertisement.  In comparison, a regional paper would charge $200 for one day of a 4cm single column classified ad.  This is what CNZ did a while ago.  CNZ obtained 130 applications in 2 weeks.  We held 2 rounds of group interviews of 1 hour each and selected the most suitable person (and this has been proven so far).  We did not employ an HR consultant or recruitment house to handle this process, and we do not have an HR person in the company.  The end result is that we have spent $200 in the process and employed a very suitable person.  This is one example of using the web for business purposes.  For more real life examples and some concise guidelines, please read this tutorial:  http://www.cnz.co.nz/content/view/68/5/

We talked about adding grains to our line up of computer system models in the July CPD seminar.  The purpose is to provide more choices for channel members to meet customer requirements.  After the introduction of Diamond Plus for Core i3 which has been a success, we hereby introduce an Atom version for Short 1U. 

Short 1U is small and looks like a tray of a drawer.  The current version is based on Celeron and 945GC chipset.  The Atom version is based on the latest CPU called D510 and chipset called NM10- the CPU has dual cores with integrated VGA similar to Core i3.  We introduce D510 because it is in vogue whereas Celeron will disappear some time in the future.  Our benchmarking shows Celeron to be faster.  The prices of both versions are the same.  We pay the same money for performance or perception.
www.compucon.co.nz/component/option,com_wrapper/Itemid,248/

In addition to the IPMI monitoring service which we made available to channel members about a year ago, we hereby publish RAID monitoring as an extra option.  This came about when we analysed HDD failure statistics and found that 40.6% of HDD failures were associated with RAID.  HDD is getting bigger and bigger (now 2TB for SATA) and cheaper and cheaper over time.  There is an appeal for customers to store more data which is after all the basis of having an information system (data is the most valuable asset of a company).  We can expect an exponential growth of HDD installations. 

RAID comes into the equation as a protection against a complete loss of data.  We provide 3 major suppliers of RAID technology: Adaptec, Intel and AMD and their implementation is different amongst them.  Do we expect every channel member to be proficient with the maintenance of all these implementations?  No, we do not. 

The new RAID monitoring service is designed to provide a FAST response to all installed RAID system issues and to assist channel members who are thin on technical human resources.  We will know when a RAID system issues an alarm message and can initiate immediate attention and actions. This service can be treated as part of a preventive maintenance scheme for customers.  Please read the word preventive again.  When a HDD or RAID array fails, we need corrective actions.  Corrective actions cannot be pre-arranged.  The best shot is to respond immediately.  This is what we offer to do now.  In order to provide a value to the customer, we include “fast response initiation” as a pre-paid fixed price service.  Customers will see the benefits easily as this will reduce the chance of losing data.   Coupled with IPMI monitoring, we are sure that our Compucon channel members are equipped to support customers very well.  Please see this URL for our RAID Monitoring service: www.compucon.co.nz/content/view/677/139/