Terminal Servers for B&L Information Systems

January 2013 Newsletter Excerpt

The Technology department has been very busy in 2012. Not only have we been managing new and existing users for the B&L Cloud, we also have been keeping the Cloud infrastructure up and running 24 hours a day/ 7 days a week/ 365 days a year. This is not always an easy task when you have Windows update.

One of the things that we have implemented and that we are in the process of rolling out to our cloud users is a terminal server (TS) load-balanced farm. This is not your typical farm with oversized cows, goats, or anything like that; but, instead is a way for us to distribute workload across multiple terminal server computers in order to achieve optimal resource utilization, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid server overload.

An additional benefit of using a TS load-balanced farm is that the remote desktop security is enhanced by switching over to a secure (https) channel for communication. This means that every time you connect with remote desktop all of the information between you and our servers is encrypted. Another added benefit for B&L is that if we were to have a problem with one of our terminal servers or if we needed to do maintenance on a single server, we can easily redirect the user to one of our other terminal servers. As our customer base grows, we are also able to add new servers into the farm without inconveniencing customers with new URL information.

If you are using Odyssey SaaS along with B&L's Cloud offering and have not yet upgraded to the TS farm, please contact our technology department at technology@blinfo.com for more information. We will also continue the process of contacting each of you to get this installed at your site. And as always, remember "The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement." ( Unknown, Source.)

(From the desk of Joe Harmon, Vice President - Technology)