With the end of 2010 fast approaching, it is time to start thinking about taxes and investing in bookkeeping software for the upcoming year.

This doesn’t have to be a painful process. A simple solution is hosted QuickBooks; this service is very popular among businesses, CPAs, bookkeepers and financial companies.  

What is hosted QuickBooks? 
It is a full version of the QuickBooks software installed on a server in a data center. With the proper credentials you can log in and remotely use your own secure copy of QuickBooks from any computer – Mac or PC. Because installation and updates are done by the data center it is extremely quick and easy to set up and get started with QuickBooks. 

Having your existing or new QuickBooks software hosted on our platform enables “QuickBooks file collaboration on-the-go” and also permits you to have simultaneous collaboration for a maximum of 20 users, depending on the license.  The anytime, anywhere access allows for outsourced bookkeeping, easy sharing with your accountants, remote offices, and telecommuting employees. This technology can transform you from a stationary user to a connected, yet independent operator. 

Hosted QuickBooks is different than QuickBooks Online. When you use hosted QuickBooks you are accessing the full version of QuickBooks Pro, Premier, or Enterprise. The online version is an entirely different piece of software and pared down from the complete versions. For example, the 1099 form—a very common document used in the accounting industry—is only available as a premium feature of QuickBooks Online, yet comes standard with every version of hosted QuickBooks. Additionally, hosted QuickBooks has other advanced features such as opening multiple windows, sales tracking and inventory tracking.

Using hosted QuickBooks provides the full functionality of the software regardless of where you use it and how many people are collaborating.  

A quick recap of Hosted QuickBooks:

• Simple setup so you don’t have to mess around with software or IT services for QuickBooks.
• Accessible from any computer with internet access.
• Saves time with remote sharing of spreadsheets and statements with your clients, accountants, and coworkers.
• Add-ons like 1099 forms, inventory and sales order tracking are included.

Visit our website for more information about hosted QuickBooks.  You can also call Gene Rabich at 206.577.3078 x1 to learn more about the service.

We spend a lot of time here thinking about networking. Usually it involves pondering things like bandwidth, low latency connections and routing. However there is another type of networking that is just as essential for companies. This would be networking in the traditional sense - forming face-to-face connections with fellow business owners, employees and community members. This kind of networking has a lot of advantages for the startup or small business owner. It can lead to new partnerships, new clients, and expanded knowledge. Plus as a startup, sometimes it is simply nice to get out of the office and meet other people who understand the challenges and joys of starting or working for a new company.

With so many networking events Seattle it can be overwhelming to locate and find the most effective opportunities. I’ve created a list of my favorite networking events around the city. These are primarily technology, startup and entrepreneur themed meetups. 

I hope to see at one of them!

ListServs, Newsletters and Calendars that post information about networking and tech events:

Seattle Tech Calendar 
Seattle 2.0 Event List 
Seattle Business Journal Calendar 
Seattle Startup Digest 
Seattle Tech Startups Listserv 
Seattle Times Business Events Calendar 
Tech Flash Event List
xconomy - Seattle Local Events list 

A client emailed me curious as to what our recycled servers looked like. He imagined beat up cases, duct taped together. We were pleased to let him know that recycled servers look like any other server because they are a fully functional, cost saving options that are rigorously tested.

Photographs of recycled servers by Nathan Eisenberg.

Blog Post by Nathan Eisenberg

Virtualization offers resource consolidation, better asset utilization, and a hardware-agnostic environment for operating systems that traditionally don't appreciate sudden hardware changes.  By themselves, these are interesting and valuable features. But what is often overlooked is how virtualization can increase the availability of infrastructure and provide reliability.  

The unsung advantage to virtualization is enabled by the layer of hardware agnosticism - as far as the OS knows or cares, it's always running on a vanilla hardware platform, regardless of what physical hardware is actually in place.  The benefit is migration, especially LIVE migration.

Live migration is the ability to move a running operating system, a Linux Apache2 web server for example, from one piece of physical hardware to another without compromising the availability of that operating system or its services.  Let's look at what this means practically.

Imagine there are two servers (Host-A, Host-B), and a shared storage device.  Host-A is running a web server VM (VM-Web-A). The load is getting high, so we want to add a second CPU to Host-A. With a traditional server, this would mean scheduling downtime and IT resources to do the work after-hours. The site goes down and we have to wait until after the maintenance window to access the additional CPU resources.  In a fast-paced world, this is too slow.

Virtualization unshackles your workload from your server. Utilizing a well-designed virtualization infrastructure, we can do this upgrade during business hours, as soon as the CPU arrives from the vendor!  With a single command and without dropping a packet or a session, VM-Web-A moves from Host-A to Host-B, leaving Host-A free for maintenance.

It is pretty cool. But why stop there?  Say the site on VM-Web-A is absolutely mission critical.  Downtime, even for a minute, is hugely expensive.  The mechanism that enables live migration can be extended to provide one last benefit - but understanding it requires a fundamental grasp of how VMs move between machines.  In brief, the contents of the VM's memory, as well as the state of its CPU, are copied from Host-A to Host-B. Once the bulk of the data is copied, it's continuously synchronized until it matches exactly - and then the VM 'simply' becomes active on Host-B, and inactive on Host-A.

The logical next step is elegant in its simplicity.  If we can synchronize the state of a VM's memory and CPU between two physical machines, and move the VM between them as soon as that synchronization is established, it stands to reason that we can cut it over at any time we please.

The result is application-agnostic high availability, a VM that literally 'runs' in two places - one active, one hot standby.  
So let's return to our scenario.  Our high profile ecommerce site is chugging away, happily fulfilling orders, when the power supply in Host-A dies.  VM-Web-A immediately becomes active on Host-B. No dropped packets, no lost sessions, no error messages or time-outs. It just keeps working, orders keep processing, and everyone stays happy.

The time and money spent on outages and scheduled maintenance is sometimes not considered, yet those soft costs add up over time. With virtualization you get improved reliability and which ultimately leads to savings.

For more information about Atlas Networks’ virtualization options please complete this web form.

Mike Crill, Managing Director of Atlas Accelerator and a board member of Atlas Networks, spoke at the MITEF VLab Incubators and Accelerators event. It was an opportunity for entrepreneurs to learn about funding and working with an incubator. For those who missed out there is a video recap available below.