Digital Solutions from the Right Team!

How are you driving your business ahead with digital?  Corner Edge provides digital innovation in application and web development. Dynamic media rich content delivered though advanced solutions. Custom developed tools that precisely fit specific business needs while also being flexible and expandable. Unique design and marketing services for all media outlets, print, web and social solutions. Multi platform Design and Development for desktop and mobile devices. Responsive support team on the cutting edge of IT to keep you up and running efficiently. Make Corner Edge your technology partner.

Don’t just post pictures of your products, 3D anmimate them!

When a picture is worth a thousand words how many is a animation worth? In this case 120,000. That’s because this short 4 second animation is composed of about 120 frames, each worth a thousand words. If your product has multiple parts or moving pieces still photography may not be doing it justice. A simple 3D animation can go a long way to help showcase your product in it’s best light. Though 3D models can be expensive to develop they can pay for themselves many times over. Once a model has been created it can be endlessly repurposed at different angles in different scenes and in different colors. Present your technical equipment in an animated exploded view to highlight the details of it’s inner workings. Show how much fun your toy trucks can be in the dirt. Use a mechanism of action 3D animation to help your patients and physicians better understand the effects of your pharmaceuticals. Corner Edge Solutions can provide you with all this and more.

Bridge the gap between print designers and web developers

We’ve  heard both sides of the story, from an art director venting “the programmers don’t understand the brand” to developers saying “the designers don’t understand the web.”

Corner Edge provides a unique service to several design studios and advertising agencies that eliminates this issue, allowing creatives to maintain complete creative control while reducing overhead cost through outsourced development. What makes our development service so unique is not only our top notch developers and database engineers but their collaboration with our design staff.  Our designers are steeped in a traditional print background. In addition to being excellent interactive designers, our staff has more than 20 years of experience in advertising, packaging, collateral and publishing. This diversity  makes Corner Edge designers ideally equipped to serve as liaison between our clients creative departments and our developers.

We understand both sides of the spectrum so nothing is lost in translation. If your agency/studio is geared primarily towards providing print advertising, package design or branding yet has a need to also deliver integrated, branded web initiatives Corner Edge can help you provide that service. Because our designers posses well rounded creative experience in both web and print they can effectively communicate with your creative team in the same language to ensure a cohesive brand translation from print materials to web and mobile devices.  This translates into time savings, fewer missed deadlines, and project success.

If your client needs a web site, mobile app, social media marketing, or other interactive product and your considering outsourcing the development be sure to partner with a company that understands your business and one that can bridge the gap between print and web.

Low Cost Disaster Recovery Options For VMware

For years now Corner Edge Solutions has been using VMware exclusively for all of our new server installs, and even for hardware upgrades by virtualizing the original server install and configuration to a new physical server with VMware.  This goes for even a small, one server setup as well.  We have felt this is a great way to increase reliability as well as improve disaster recovery times.

While having two complete setups of VMware is probably cost prohibitive, with the small footprint of VMware ESXi, you can use a simple workstation or even a laptop as a cold spare DR backup.  As you’ll see below, I have easily installed VMware on my laptop, and with a large enough hard drive, and enough memory, I could run a small to medium office server environment setup on my one laptop, or even a mid-range business desktop.  The cost of these is usually around $1500-2500, and when you consider the cost of a second server may come in at $5000 or more, this is a great low-budget way to have your office back up and working quickly in the event of a major disaster.

To do this simply, just power off the VM’s on a schedule that fits your DR needs and copy the files from the main DataStore and upload them the the DataStore on your backup setup.  You will want to make sure your backup processor is a 64-bit proc with VT enabled if you are running 64-bit VM’s, you have enough storage space for the foreseeable future, and definitely install as much memory as your budget and workstation will allow, and that should be it.

You clearly shouldn’t expect the same performance of this setup as you would get from a true server, but it would get people back online and running again while you work on the main server.

Here is a quick picture I took of my laptop running VMware ESXi just for fun.  I had installed ESXi on a USB stick, and booted to that when I powered on my laptop.  This install was originally done on a PowerEdge 2950, and without any modifications to the install, it came up just fine on an Dell Latitude E6500.  Simply carry a USB flash drive and a large external storage drive and you can have a backup ESXi server wherever you go.

Countryside gets torn down and replanted.

Countryside Tree Experts was in desperate need of a website make over, so they did the smart thing and called on Corner Edge for help. After a slight update to the logo the Corner Edge Design team started in on planning the new site. Grouping areas of interest was key to this project to make it easy for visitors to learn about the services offered. This was achieved by creating one link to “Services” and then having tabbed pages under the services header. Now a visitor can easily jump between the various tabs. A fresh modern color scheme with shades of green, gold and tan was chosen to compliment the existing logo and add soft visual appeal. Go to the gallery page to see the Countryside crew in action, snowplowing, land clearing and more. The new web site has already been a success for countryside with many users submitting requests for free estimates directly from the site. Corner Edge also provides complete hosting for the site as well as email hosting and system support.

VMware ESXi Server Keeps Running with Failed RAID Array

We at Corner Edge Solutions LOVE VMware.  It’s not too hard to tell that based on our blog, but this past week we found a new reason to fall in love all over again.  One of our ESXi 4 servers in a cluster had a double drive failure on our RAID 5 array, which would have completely crashed a server had it been a typical setup, but since it is running VMware ESXi with all the VM DataStores on a iSCSI storage device, we had ZERO impact on our environment.  ESXi is the lightweight version of the original ESX server which runs entirely in memory, not requiring disk access once it has been loaded at startup.

Since this machine was part of a cluster, we simply migrated the VMs on the failed server to the other working ESXi server through vSphere vCenter Server.  The working VMware server was able to overcommit the available physical memory by almost 50% with room to spare.  We then took down the server with the bad drives to rebuild.  We also took this opportunity to install the OS onto a USB flash drive, which installed internally to the server, and remove the remaining two working hard drives to run a completely diskless server configuration.  With a small amount of configuring to VMware, the newly rebuilt server was ready to join the cluster again and the VMs were then evenly distributed throughout the cluster, all the while never having to power anything off.  That means never having to send out maintenance notices to customers that their hosted servers will be offline, and keeping out uptime in tact.  The whole process took only about 5 hours as well.  When was the last time a total failure on a system RAID drive, and nothing went down, and everything was upgraded and repaired in 5 hours?

Does Sortfolio marketing for design services work?

The short answer is yes! Any business searching for design services will find sortfolio.com an extremely useful tool for narrowing their options. Businesses offering design services will find it to be a very worthwhile  use of about 10 minutes of their time, 10 minutes because that’s about how long it takes to add your company to the listing and it’s FREE! Simply add a brief company bio, an image that represents your design services and best of all a link to your website to give interested parties a more in depth look at your company and work. Corner Edge listed there to help drive their graphics business and have experienced positive results with valuable leads towards new business. Yes, valuable leads because right there on our listing prominently displayed is a general price guide line for a typical design project, this weeds out prospects that are looking for freelance rates as well as those looking for Madison Avenue agencies. Corner Edge services a wide base of clients ranging from Fortune 500 multi-nationals to small businesses and entrepreneurs. Whether you need branding, advertising or collateral, Corner Edge is here to help. In print, on the web or in an email campaign, we can conceptualize a program to get your message out with design that is targeted directly to your customers.

Corner Edge is proud to announce the launch of cr-law.net

Carmagnola & Ritardi, LLC is a law group located in Morristown New Jersey, offering specialized representation in labor, employment and commercial litigation matters. Carmagnola & Ritardi has contracted Corner Edge to be their IT service company. Corner Edge provides the law group with secure data hosting, CES Back Up Service, Email hosting with complete small business services and support as well as web hosting. When CR Law joined the CES client roster it was apparent that they were in desperate need of a website makeover. The design team at Corner Edge provided the client with 2 initial concepts to get the ball rolling. Then the decision makers at Carmagnola & Ritardi cherry picked their favorite elements from each design and offered some creative input of their own.

Corner Edge Design redesign of cr-law.net

The result was an updated “CR” logo with a 3D platinum look and clean new website design that is easily navigated. The home page features a Flash animation of the CR logo and animated text. iPad/iPhone and mobile visitors are redirected to an alternate home page. Even though the site has a few “under construction” pages on it we are very proud to launch this new web presence for Carmagnola & Ritardi LLC., and to address those “under construction” pages the Corner Edge development team is planning to implement their web based on site content editing system so  Carmagnola & Ritardi will have complete control over their site content.

iWeb Presentations available for iPad mobile Safari TODAY!

Corner Edge Solutions remains on the cutting edge of technology and application development with the beta release of it’s already successful iWeb Presentations platform. The growing popularity of the iPhone and iPod Touch mobile devices as well as the anticipated business market success of Apples iPad has inspired us to make our products available to a wider audience. While still available in it’s original form as a Adobe Flash based web application with a .NET backend to manage users and track data the new mobile version has been completely redeveloped from the ground up to accommodate the iPad. Corner Edge developers have embraced the Apple development environment and is excited to offer this and many more products and service applications for these ground breaking devices. Corner Edge Solutions is committed to providing the very best service on any platform. Contact Corner Edge today for a iWeb Presentations for iPad demonstration.

Virtual Office and working from anywhere

I’m happy to say I can now officially work from anywhere. Its a great feeling, and I am really enjoying this beautiful weather. Can you get out and do that efficiently today?

I can truly:

• Answer all calls on my office phone – via my software phone on my laptop.
• Make all calls with my office caller id with my softphone – caller id says I’m in the office to customers, so what if there are birds in the background.
• Access all my data on the virtual office system, outlook anywhere, & external sites via the internet
• Enjoy this beautiful weather!
• Have the freedom to sit down and work ANYWHERE with my verizon air card & laptop.

Can you work from anywhere? Call us today for more information how you can free yourself from the confines of a traditional office environment. You deserve this level of efficiency and ease of technology access.  We can help you drive your business ahead of the curve.  This is easy, and its time you took advantage of it.