Not Your Average Value Added Resource (VAR)

By Chris Saso, CTO

Dasher Technologies has been in the business of providing data center infrastructure solutions since 1999 and much has changed since Laurie worked out of her garage providing HP-UX solutions to her early clients. Today, Dasher provides both physical and virtual data center solutions to over 450 clients.

I’d like to re-introduce Dasher to our existing clients and introduce Dasher to new folks that might be looking for the private and public IT infrastructure solutions and services we provide. A few weeks ago, I was sitting in Silicon Valley traffic with one of my colleagues, and I indulged in a large cup of strong coffee. During my caffeine induced morning ramblings I said the phrase, “Dasher is really a value added resource not a reseller.” I was excited because I think it truly captures what Dasher has always been, a resource to our clients, not a company that just re-sells things to customers. We partner with traditional technology product providers, professional services providers, public/private cloud providers and of course our clients. The ecosystem we have created is what makes Dasher a value added resource.

Enough rambling (there goes the coffee again), let me give you an update on Dasher.

What do clients ask Dasher about today?

When someone asks me how Dasher can help their business succeed, I like to start by sharing the types of IT solutions that our clients are asking us for help with. As a CS Major I was taught to think of writing programs as a way to address use cases. Here at Dasher, we ask, “What are the use cases that someone would need to utilize Dasher as a resource?” Use cases are driven by business units that have specific business tasks they are trying to address. We help clients translate their business tasks and goals into use cases and then to IT solutions.

Today, our clients come to us with the following use case list:

I need to design a physical or cloud IT solution.

We have been helping clients design data center solutions for almost two decades and with that experience we can help you design virtual cloud DCs as well.
Many of our “born-in-the-cloud” clients are using public cloud and their own private assets — like networking and security solutions along with a few servers and storage devices. We work with each client to determine the right mix of on premise and cloud IT products to create a complete solution.

Further Reading
Healthcare IT Departments Thrive with Zayo Group Cloud Offering

I need to migrate workloads from my physical or virtualized (VMware, KVM, OpenStack, etc.) private data center to the public or private cloud.

The goal of seamless migration between public and private clouds is a business driver enabling client agility. Dasher can help come up with a strategy and a run book to execute on that plan.
Migrations can be time consuming and challenging to setup and configure, so not only can we help you architect them, we can help you deliver them cost effectively and time efficiently.
We also spend time creating industry reviews on products, some of which we sell and others that we do not, in order to educate our clients on the options available.

Further Reading
Which Network Storage Protocol is best suited for VMware?
VMware vRealize Automation with NSX
Moving from Virtualization to Orchestration
Server-side Flash & Hyperconvergence – Two of the Latest Ways to Improve Virtualization Performance

I need to protect my company assets.

Beginning in 2010, Dasher has focused on expanding our networking and security engineering teams in order to have the right resources to assist our clients with protecting and reporting on their assets from the firewall to the core and the firewall to edge devices.
We have expertise in securing our client environments at the firewall, endpoint, API, website, mobile, email, social, SIEM and IAM.

Further Reading
Palo Alto Networks Technical Resources List
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Blade Infrastructure – Managing Firmware and Drivers

I need a secure network to access public and private resources, and my employees need excellent wireless access.

Dasher has a complete networking assessment service. We know that both our clients and Dasher need to completely understand the existing wired and wireless network in a space before we can make recommendations on how to get it ready for the current wave of new wireless and IoT technologies.
Assessment tools are key. We have invested in state-of-the-art assessment tools that we use to quickly understand the condition of your environment.
We have deep expertise in all of the major brands of networking solutions so we can compare and contrast solutions for our clients; thus, reducing the time our clients’ staff need to spend researching and staying up-to-date on the latest technology.
Network Access Control solutions play a critical role in network access management by staff and guests, and we use these technologies in house to manage our own guest network access. When you visit Dasher you will sign in on an tablet and an email be sent to you with login credentials for the Dasher wireless network. These credentials are valid for 1 day, so we can monitor and manage our guest access and demonstrate that we use the solutions we architect and provide to our clients.

Further Reading
Best Practices for Planning and Securing a Wireless Deployment
Dasher Deploys Wireless Networking Solutions to Silicon Valley Community Colleges

I still need physical or virtual servers to run my business. Can you help me figure out where my workloads should go and compare and contrast physical, virtual, public and private options in the marketplace?

Dasher grew our business by selling server and storage technologies and this remains one of our core competencies. Our expertise is with all the Tier 1 and Tier 2 physical server vendors and with operating systems such as Linux and MS Windows. We have expanded that core expertise to include AWS and Microsoft Azure public cloud server options alongside new technologies such as hyperconvergence solutions. We are also partnered with managed services providers if you would like to outsource the management of your IT solutions.
We have deep expertise with VMware and OpenStack. As a matter of fact, we have an active test bed for our clients to learn more about OpenStack and Container options such as Docker.
Dasher engineers are educating our clients on DevOps and new IT practices and how they impact IT staff and operations’ TCO.

Further Reading
OSPod – Dasher’s OpenStack Solution

My storage needs are growing, and I need to decide between using physical storage in my data centers, using cloud storage, or a combination of both. What are the costs and benefits of one over the other for my particular workload? And I need to back this stuff up, but I am not interested in tape. What are my options?

There are so many new technologies for storing data and backing it up that have come along in the past few years that our biggest value to our clients in this area is to compare and contrast the various protocols, such as block (FC and iSCSI), file (NFS and SMB), and object (S3) — along with the various tiers of storage such as SSD, NVMe, SAS, SATA, etc. — to find the right solution, be it physical or cloud based.
We work with many vendor partners that offer private only, public only, or hybrid solutions.
Backup is an ever evolving area which includes backing up servers and endpoints on prem and/or to the cloud. While this topic sounds boring, it has become one of the most important ways to protect against some of today’s new breed of hackers and ransomware. Being able to quickly restore your company data is critical to a company’s success.
Finally, I recently updated a storage industry review that I would be happy to share with you upon request. It starts out at a high level with industry terminology, dives into protocols, compares/contrasts storage types (file, block, object, shared SAN/NAS, SSD, NVMe), and contains summary pages on each major technology vendor in the space.