Maximizing IT Investments Through Managed IT Services

Managed IT services are a very powerful way for a small or medium size business to keep its infrastructure solid and flexible while retaining a small budget. As a smaller business may lack the funds to create and maintain a full IT department of its own, leasing such services can be a smart move on a variety of fronts. Ultimately, the benefits of managed IT services go beyond mere budgetary concerns, and extend into both increased efficiency and overall effectiveness in an organization. Your organization may not be putting your resources into the right place.

Many business owners prefer to keep all operations close to themselves, but this may not be the best way for you to do business. Simply put, trying to make their business do everything in house represents insecurity. If you trust that other companies may be able to conduct certain processes better than your staff can, you might be ready to investigate managed IT services.

You might feel like your budget is constantly stretched tighter than anyone else's, but almost every small and medium size business owner feels this way. The problem of having to constantly make a dollar out of three quarters is not new at all, but many business owners make the mistake of trying to relentlessly save money within their own organizations, even when some kinds of saving hurt their operations. While frugality is wise, trying to slash costs on everything at the expense of effectiveness is ultimately self destructive.

How to Set Up and Configure FreeNAS

I have been playing around with old hardware recently and one of the things I have done is install and set up FreeNAS NAS storage. This tutorial will show you how.

Before we do anything you must first find out your network configuration. In windows open up a command prompt and type ipconfig /all. In Linux open up a terminal and type ifconfig. Write down your IPv4 address, default gateway, subnet mask and DNS servers as we will be using this information later.

Now we need to get our hands on a copy of FreeNAS. Once downloaded burn a copy to CD. The next thing you have to do is decide where you are going to install it. I chose an old computer I had lying around (thanks Rob) but you could just as well install it within a virtual machine. The computer had 10Gb of storage and I installed another 1.5Tb. FreeNAS can be installed on a USB penstick thus saving your hard drive for network storage but since I had the 10Gb disk I used that instead.

Insert the CD into your computer and allow the software to install. Once installed you will arrive at the console setup which will give you the URL to access your installation via a web interface. For example mine was 192.168.1.12.