Flantec exists to assist small & medium size businesses to take advantage of many of the technological benefits of a large enterprise, but without the costly employee overhead and technology infrastructure.
An Apple A Day…
For the last several years, Flantec has been working with its clients in varying industries to deploy Apple Macintosh computers into areas where only PC’s have traditionally been used.
While there are many reasons for doing so, the primary motivation for replacing a PC with a Mac is reliability.
Apple Macintosh computers are built on top of a rock-solid reliable FreeBSD foundation. An added benefit is that Macs are not susceptible to virus and malware infection like PC’s are.
Businesses often do not consider a Mac because they have only ever purchased Windows-based PC’s in the past.
And, Apple Mac computers are more expensive than their Windows counterparts, which will often times, disqualify them from considerations for a business computer. However, that can be a short-sighted decision when considering the total cost of ownership. A single viral infection, or failure to boot due to a corrupt registry file, can easily result in hundreds of dollars of troubleshooting & repairs, not to mention the additional business cost of computer downtime.
And, while Macs and PC’s USED to be the same under the hood with Intel CPU’s, Apple has redefined the personal computer archetype, using their own silicone chips now. Having constructed a complete System-On-A-Chip (SoC) design, now many of the once separate motherboard components are now integrated into the CPU. This results in some of the fastest personal computers ever manufactured. And Apple is only getting started with this…
A Server Room WITHOUT Windows…
FreeBSD is a Unix-based alternate server platform to Microsoft’s Windows Server software. FreeBSD has many features that are superior to Windows, including rock-solid server stability, increased security and resistance to most viruses. However, probably the most attractive feature of FreeBSD is its price; FreeBSD is FREE.
Conversely, Microsoft’s software licenses are expensive. Very expensive. An small office with a dozen or more employees can easily generate thousands of dollars in licensing fees. Many of Flantec’s clients utilize FreeBSD servers to host files, databases, websites & email services.
While Windows Servers cannot be replaced with FreeBSD in all instances, there are just as many cases in which it can be transparently integrated into an office network.
Virtual Possibilities
Virtualization makes it possible to divide up the hardware in a single computer chassis into multiple logical units, creating virtual machines. Each virtual machine operates independently, and makes better use of the server hardware by allocating specific resources to individual server responsibilities.
Virtualization also allows for disparate systems to co-exist peacefully under the hood. This can be a perfect opportunity to marry FreeBSD servers systems to the existing Microsoft Windows environment to create networks that actually work as designed; Low-maintenance, high-reliabilty, high-redundancy servers coupled without the necessity of a full-time network administrator to oversee.
There are many additional benefits to using virtual servers including:
- Redundancy roles
- Division of server responsibilities
- Isolation of secure resources
- Individual maintenance downtimes