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Datotel Named To Inc. 5000 List for 2011

Posted on August 23, 2011 by admin

We’re pleased to announce that, for the 2nd year in a row, Datotel has been named
to the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America:

ST. LOUIS, AUGUST 23, 2011 – St. Louis-based Datotel, LLC, a state-of-the-art cloud computing and colocation provider, is being named today to the Inc. 5000 exclusive ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. Datotel was recognized by the magazine, along with other independent companies, for achieving outstanding business growth over the previous three years.

“We are honored to be included on this year’s Inc. 5000 list and are thankful for the dedication and hard work of our employees in growing Datotel as well as the continued commitment and support of our clients,” said David Brown, CEO of Datotel. “In 2004, we started with the dream of being the leading IT services provider for businesses and organizations in St. Louis, and continue to strive for that mission every day.”
Datotel continues its growth plans in 2011 with the recent opening of a second location in Chicago to join its present headquarters in downtown St. Louis. The decision to expand regionally was made to further meet the needs of clients seeking disaster recovery (DR) solutions, including backup services for cloud computing applications.

“We understand that disaster recovery solutions are critically important to many of our clients, from small- and medium-sized businesses to enterprise-level firms,” said Brown. “As cloud environments continue to grow and evolve, we are able to help our clients fully realize the productivity and efficiency of cloud computing while maintaining security and on-demand accessibility.”

Datotel ranked 2,209 on the fifth annual Inc. 5000 for 2011 with a three-year growth trend of 113 percent, closing 2010 with revenue exceeding $6 million. Client acquisitions in health care, financial services and nonprofit organizations have driven the majority of growth over the last year. Read the Inc. 5000 Datotel Profile here.

Complete results of the Inc. 5000, including company profiles and an interactive database that can be sorted by industry, region, and other criteria, can be found at www.inc.com/5000.

Methodology
The 2011 Inc. 500 is ranked according to percentage revenue growth when comparing 2007 to 2010. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2007. Additionally, they had to be U.S.-based, privately held, for profit, and independent—not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies—as of December 31, 2010. (Since then, a number of companies on the list have gone public or been acquired.) The minimum revenue required for 2007 is $100,000; the minimum for 2010 is $2 million. As always, Inc. reserves the right to decline applicants for subjective reasons. Companies on the Inc. 500 are featured in Inc.’s September issue. They represent the top tier of the Inc. 5000, which can be found at www.inc.com/500.

About Inc. Magazine
Founded in 1979 and acquired in 2005 by Mansueto Ventures LLC, Inc. (www.inc.com) is the only major business magazine dedicated exclusively to owners and managers of growing private companies that delivers real solutions for today’s innovative company builders. With a total paid circulation of 710,106, Inc. provides hands-on tools and market-tested strategies for managing people, finances, sales, marketing, and technology. Visit us online at www.inc.com.

About Datotel, LLC
St. Louis-based Datotel is a provider of cloud computing environments and colocation services from its carrier-class data center facility, complemented by a full suite of IT services to manage technology systems. Datotel has a $10 million state-of-the-art colocation facility managed and designed to provide IT infrastructures and systems a secure, stable and highly available environment. Datotel does regular work for organizations ranging from Fortune 500 companies to not-for-profits. The company can be reached at 1-877-241-9101 or www.datotel.com.

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Attack of the Technology Monster

Posted on July 27, 2011 by admin

– guest post by Michael Chua, Solutions Engineer –

Many of us in the IT world have been there before: we see the shiniest, newest, glitziest piece of technological wizardry and we MUST have it. We figure out a way to finagle it into the budget, network infrastructure and justify it to ourselves that this shiny, new toy will have a positive ROI very soon.

Then, reality sets in; management asks for reasoning behind the expenses and your explanation doesn’t fly. You’ve succumbed to the technology monster! You’re a technology addict and you may have just put your job at risk because of it.

Our staff has seen first-hand that the technology monster is alive and well out there – in small businesses, medium-sized firms and large corporations. Recently, we worked with a non-for-profit organization with these needs: internal networking, email, file storage, light databases, mobile workforce nothing unusual in that list. However, once our solutions team took a closer look at the environment, well — that’s when we recognized that the technology monster had been at work.

Their environment consisted of: 30+ vm servers in the VMWare environment, latest version of VMWare, clustered Exchange environment with 2 CAS and 2 DAG servers for under 100 users. Server 2008 R2 datacenter with Exchange server 2010 Enterprise, 3 physical server cluster, multi-terabyte SAN, 2 external low-terabyte NAS, BES Enterprise latest version (of course) and BB units all serviced in-house (batteries, spare parts, etc.).
The organization’s workstations used to be old Dells with Windows 2k/256 or 512 MB of RAM. But, that hardware was left behind in favor of new Intel i7 laptops with separate 1 GB video memory graphics cards, 128 or 256 GB SSDs and 8 GB of memory, which is like going from driving a Model A to a Porsche! A technology upgrade was warranted, but jumping up that many levels and going all out with the new laptops wasn’t necessary.

Why do I bring up this story? In my career that started shortly before IBM’s PC was introduced (the good old days!), the most common refrain heard from my fellow IT colleagues was “if I could get rid of the end users, my job would be perfect”. Well, that may have been the sentiment, but the reality was that without those end users, there was little need for IT support. Unfortunately, this was simply the prevailing mood at the time: technology was deployed in a vacuum and for its own sake, without a sound business case and very little input from end users.

I believe that this thinking contributed to the tech bubble in the late 1990’s, and it was a painful experience when it finally burst. However, we can look back on that time now and see that the rise and fall was necessary to bring about a significant change in IT philosophy. The result has been good for the industry; businesses and end-users now demand real benefits from their technology and expect accountability from their technology providers.

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How We Use ITIL v3 To Improve Customer Service

Posted on July 15, 2011 by admin

– co-authored by Melissa Byers, Manager of Customer Support –

It’s obvious to say that data centers don’t manage themselves — it takes a combination of staff, processes and technology to ensure that the systems and process run smoothly and efficiently.

The primary objective of service management is to ensure that the IT services are aligned to the
corporate business need as well as those of customers. Last year, our team implemented the ITIL v3 (IT Infrastructure Library) processes Incident Management and Problem Management. What is ITIL then? It’s a public framework and best practices guide, focusing on continual measurement and improvement in the quality of IT services that are delivered, from both business and customer perspectives.

The service lifecycle is made up of five parts: strategy, design, transition, operation and continual service improvement.

1. The Service Strategy involves deciding the types of services that should be offered and target audience for those services. In addition, the strategy describes how the value of the services will be perceived by that audience and the method for measuring that value.

2. Service Design is the documented policies and procedures that are needed to meet current and future agreed business requirements. The five aspects of service design are new or changed service solutions, service management systems and tools, technology architectures and management systems, processes roles and capabilities, and measurement methods and metrics. Effectively designed services are based upon four key principles: People, Products, Processes and Partners.

3. Service Transition is the delivery of services that are required by the business into operational use: taking it from design into execution through a series of strategic, tactical and operation steps. The process starts with transition planning and support, then managing the deployment, validating the service and finally, testing and evaluating the result.

4. Service Operation revolves around the delivery of the agreed upon service levels customers and management of the applications, technology and infrastructure that support delivery of the services. The operational activities are: Event Management, Incident Management, Request Fulfillment, Access Management Process and Problem Management Process.

5. Continual Service Improvement means maintaining value for customers through the persistent evaluation and improvement of the quality of services as well as assessing the overall maturity of the ITSM service life cycle and underlying processes.

There is a 7-step improvement process that starts with the gathering of pertinent data, dissecting the information for identifiable trends and sharing the information with management in order to draw larger conclusions and needed actions.

Step1 – Define what you should measure
Step 2 – Define what you CAN measure
Step 3 – Gather the data
Step 4 – Process the data
Step 5 – Analyze the data
Step 6 – Present and use the information
Step 7 – Implement corrective action

We’ve seen great response to these new processes not only reflected in our metrics (reduced response and resolution times), our customer service surveys (based on incidents) from our clients, and from our employees because collaboration between the departments has greatly improved.

Later this year, our team will implement the Change, Access, and Configuration Management portion; we’ll be sharing details on that process as well as other ITIL-related information in future posts.

Thanks for reading,
- shelly

@datotel

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So you’re backing up your data, but when was the last time you tried to restore it?

Posted on June 24, 2011 by David Brown

In the last week, I’ve come across three business owners who had thought that they had a great backup and recovery process in place for their organization –  that in the event of data loss, they could easily and seamlessly restore their data. I use the words “had thought” as they had also recently found out that although they did indeed have a process in place, the backups were either 1) failing 2) not providing sufficient protection for all their data or 3) they simply couldn’t restore the data they needed. Despite what these owners thought, their business’ internal systems weren’t protecting them. Unfortunately, they found this out the hard way, which is painful but it did create a need for information and opened an opportunity for us to speak with them about solutions so that this kind of event doesn’t happen again.

There are many technical solutions from tape to online backup with pros and cons to each; but any backup and recovery solution is no good if it isn’t adequately maintained or checked on a regular basis. Organizations change over time, and whether you’re conducting backup and recovery yourself, as these businesses were, or relying on an outside resource such as Datotel, the backup and recovery process needs to adapt to meet those changing needs.

When was the last time that you verified that all aspects of your data protection are in place and being met? When was the last time that you performed an actual file level restore and confirmed that your backups are not only running adequately, but the time to restore the data meets current business requirements and expectations?

If it’s been a while, maybe today would be a good day to try it, before you find yourself in a tight spot.

What stories of data loss do you have?

@ddbrown

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