"Trendy" Technlogies

Linux

We like Linux! Many small businesses could, run their entire business on Linux. Linux can run most generalized types of software, including clones of office suites such as LibreOffice or OpenOffice. Linux runs the vast majority of the web, the vast majority of the databases on the web, and your Android phone. We recommend Red Hat Enterprise for those clients whose applications demand a *certified* version of Linux. There are many flavors to choose from.

Virtualization

Virtualzation is an exciting technology. This is for companies consolidating many servers into one physical unit to save money, power, or space. It can also make upgrades easier. Dentar, Inc. has experience with VMWare Hypervisor, Linux KVM / libvirt, VirtualBox, and Hyper-V.

Virtualization is not a one size fits all solution, and is not recommended for everyone.

Interesting tidbit: You can run Linux under Windows Hyper-V, and you can run Windows under Linux Kernel KVM

We have 21 different virtual machines here that are used at different times.

Wireless / WiFi

WiFi is great for portable use or doing lightweight work. For customers with heavy traffic or frequent database access, wired Ethernet is your best bet.

Wireless gets worse when you have more people on it because there is no "traffic control" on WiFi.

For Dental offices, Dentrix recommends NOT using WiFi, as do we.

For printers, we recommend hard-wired. Some brands will function properly, but one top tier brand has lots of WiFi problems with their printers.

Fiber

We've seen a very large amount of reliability issues with copper DSL style internet lines (i.e. phone line internet.)

If your internet goes out a lot and you're on copper DSL, switching to cable or fiber may improve it vastly.

SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) UNIX / OpenServer / Xinuos

SCO UNIX / OpenServer are "legacy" products, meaning the reason people are running them today is to support an old application which is not portable to another UNIX or Linux system.

All work on their products is best-efforts only, and time and materials.

Many programs for this have been ported to Linux, which we highly recommend.

Ink Printers

We do not sell Ink printers. We have found ink printers to be too unreliable to supply in good conscience, unless a particular application demands it.

Bitcoin / Crypto / NFT

We do not deal with, sell, or purchase these volatile items.

A.I. or "Artificial Intelligence" / ChatGPT

We prefer human ingenuity over the use of ChatGPT or A.I.

We do not use A.I. to write code or support your I.T. infrastructure.

GPT / A.I. has been implicated with plagiarism of both computer program source and creative writing.

Investors are betting heavily on this technology