The CIO for SMB

Last week the team at eddsa spent just a few hours with a new prospect, now customer, who asked us to take a look at their network and make some recommendations. We charged very little money for this service and any money that they spent would be applied to a new managed services contract, should they decide to team with us after the assessment. They have 40 employees, a server and about 40 PC’s.

While the customer thought that their current system was sound, they had some inkling that the server was not being taken care of properly. They also knew they had some storage issues that needed to be addressed. Here is what we found:

• The top 10 mailboxes on the server range in size from 7GB to 18GB with 25K to 45K messages. These are very large mailboxes and may be causing mailbox performance issues for these users.

• There have been some problems with the tape backup. The tape can backup the data but can’t perform the verification. The firm is doing some backup to hard drives.
• No Disaster Recovery Plan in place.
• No Backup Strategy in place.
• No Contingency Plan for failed hardware in place.
• No Patch Management system was noted.
• Using the VPN is the only way to connect to the network. The current VPN connections sometimes cause problems for the users.
• There is no current inventory of equipment or network diagrams.
• There is no software license inventory.
• Outlook clients occasionally experience connection errors to the Exchange server.
• The Exchange Server does not appear to have any service packs installed.
  • The new server is build 6.5.6944. This is the original release from October 2003.
  • The old server had SP2 build 6.5.7638 installed but the new one does not.
• It does not appear that a System State backup is being run.
  • Active Directory (a critical part of the OS backup and Exchange backup) is not being backed up.
• It does not appear that one of the directory partition has been backed up for 30 days.
• In the past 30 days the firm has received nearly 1.5 million spam messages.
  • SPAM Report for last 30 days:
    • Total Inbound Email = 1,477,805 messages
    • SPAM Inbound = 1,461,612
    • SPAM% = 99%
  • May be causing some performance issues.
• The Exchange database is highly fragmented.
  • The database is in nearly 45,000 fragments.
  • May be causing some performance issues.

In our initial meeting this customer told us that they could not run their business without computers. After seeing the results of our assessment the customer signed a managed service contract with eddsa and we are in the process of stabilizing the system.