2012 February :: Third Tier

Archive for February 2012

Feb
16

Can Third Tier help solve your staffing problems?

by amy

As an IT business owner that has spent the last 14 months searching, trying and failing to hire qualified technicians, I know the pain of building a fully staffed small IT firm first hand. Even if you’ve been successful at hiring a quality crop of work-a-day IT staff there are still gaps. You fall into one of those gaps when a SQL or Exchange server goes sideways, group policy doesn’t behave the way you expected, the server migration project gets stuck or DFS just isn’t syncing like it should. No one likes to admit that they have gaps in their ability to cover every possible issue that their client might come up with, but we’ve all got them.

To help full those gaps, Third Tier will let you open a ticket on demand and work with which ever one of our staff picks up the ticket. A little over 400 IT firms open such tickets with us last year. But now we’re also offering what is in essence micro-staffing. Hire a super highly qualified staff member and only work them 10 hours a quarter or 10 hours a month. That’s micro-staffing. We’re calling it My Third Tier.

Here’s what Channelnomics has to say about what Third Tier is offering:

Virtualization Model May Solve IT Talent Shortage

The channel and the entire IT industry are in a talent drought. Vendors and solution providers alike can’t find the right people to perform the tasks they need at the right time. Even when they find the “right guy” for the job, they usually can’t afford to place him or her in a full-time position. The shortage has vendors and solution providers competing for talent – the vendors, with their deep pockets, usually win.

Perhaps there isn’t a tech talent shortage. Perhaps it’s just a utilization and capacity issue no different than a poor performing data center before being consolidated through virtualization. Perhaps infrastructure virtualization could provide the model for resolving the talent plague affecting the channel.

What got me thinking about this was an email I got from Amy Babinchak, a principle of Third Tier, a solution provider who now offers IT outsourcing support to other solution providers. Her firm is changing its service model, fractionalizing the services provided to clients to make them more digestible, affordable and available.

The Third Tier packaging gives solution providers two options: monthly and quarterly support – each $1,400. In each package, solution providers receive up to 10 hours of on-demand support services per time period. The quarterly plan charges $175 per hour for any additional time required; the monthly plan’s hourly charge is $140.
“We decided to add the fractional hiring option because our customers asked for it. In IT, speed to resolution makes money, and the more two IT people work together the faster they can resolve a problem. Relationships are important too. The more you work together, the better you work together. And where else can you hire a $150,000 a year guy in an increment as small as 10 hours a quarter? We’re giving IT firms an opportunity to add expertise to their firms that they otherwise couldn’t afford,” Babinchak told Channelnomics.

Read the whole article: http://channelnomics.com/2012/02/16/virtualize-channel-talent/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

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0 Categories : Amy Babinchak

Feb
10

Third Tier featured on Datto One-Take Video Blog

by amy

Amy and Brian were special guests on the Datto video blog. We discuss why should should buy your Datto from Third Tier; The extra benefits we are offering at no cost to you and Brian shares his client’s disaster. That disaster was happening as we recorded the video! Ready to learn more? Head over to the Datto page of our website: http://www.thirdtier.net/datto

Amy and Brian at Datto

0 Categories : Amy Babinchak, Brian Higgins, Datto

Feb
7

We’ve got your Business Continuity Solution. It’s Datto!

by amy

Now purchase your Datto Siris business continuity appliances from Third Tier. We’ve done our research and decided that Datto makes the most complete solution in the industry. In a crowded field, Datto stands out as Third Tier worthy so much so that we have chosen them as our very first product offering.

The question I know you are asking is why you would purchase from Third Tier when you can go direct to Datto? We have a simple answer:

· Our price to you is the same as direct

· You still get your own management portal

· You get all the same features

· AND you get Third Tier support hours with every purchase. These hours will be issued as a credit to your Third Tier account. You can use them for any ticket you with us on any topic. Not limited to Datto support.

Datto’s business continuity solution includes all of the features that your clients need. It uses the ShadowProtect backup engine and you get the bells and whistles of data restore like Exchange mail item, and Sharepoint document restore. Of course the backups are images which you can mount locally on the appliance or in the cloud at no additional charge. Cloud seeding is included too. There are a lot more features too.

The real question is does it work? I can tell you that it does. A member of our Third Tier team has a client with a failed server. They have been running from the image of that server loaded as a virtual machine for over three weeks! Why so long? Because the performance of the disaster recovery solution is exceeding the performance they had previously when the server was working! The Datto appliance has not only saved the day, provided great performance as a virtual server when needed, but most importantly it has given them the luxury of time to make an informed decision about their next server purchase during what otherwise, without Datto, would have been a crisis decision. Don’t we wish that for all of our clients?

We’re going to have a webinar soon to demonstrate the Datto appliance to you. Please keep a watchful eye on the blog for your invitation.

0 Categories : Datto

Feb
1

How do Rejoin a Computer to the Domain without Losing it’s SID

by amy

This trick comes to be via my Active Directory study group. I suggest that everyone join a usergroup and/or a study group. It’s not that we don’t know AD, it’s that we forget or miss new features. A refresher course is fun too.

Occasionally a computer will come “disjoined” from the domain. The symptoms can be that the computer can’t login when connected to the network, message that the computer account has expired, the domain certificate is invalid, etc. These all stem from the same problem and that is that the secure channel between the computer and domain is hosed. (that’s a technical term. Smile )

The classic way to fix this problem is to unjoin and rejoin the domain. Doing so is kind of a pain because it requires a couple of reboots and the user profile isn’t always reconnected. Ewe. Further if you had that computer in any groups or assigned specific permissions to it those are gone because now your computer has a new SID, so the AD doesn’t see it as the same machine anymore. You’ll have to recreate all of that stuff from the excellent documentation that you’ve been keeping. Uh, huh, your excellent documentation. Double Ewe.

Instead of doing that we can just reset the secure channel. There are a couple of ways do this:

In AD right click the computer and select Reset Account. Then re-join without un-joining the computer to the domain. Reboot required.
In an elevated command prompt type: dsmod computer “Computer DN” – reset. Then re-join without un-joining the computer to the domain. Reboot required.
In an elevated command prompt type: netdom reset MachineName /domain DomainName /User0 UserName /Password0 {Password | *} The account whose credentials you provided must be a member of the local administrators group. No rejoin. No reboot.
In an elevate command prompt type: nltest /Server:ServerName /SC_Reset:Domain\DomainController No rejoin. No reboot.

6 Categories : Active Directory, Amy Babinchak

Archive for February 2012

Can Third Tier help solve your staffing problems?

Third Tier featured on Datto One-Take Video Blog

We’ve got your Business Continuity Solution. It’s Datto!

How do Rejoin a Computer to the Domain without Losing it’s SID

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