User:Corey Sim/sandbox

Adar, Inc. is a Chicago based company that provides streaming IT and IT-as-a-service to small and medium sized businesses. The company is known for its Streaming IT platform, Nerdio.

History
The company was founded in 2005 by Vadim Vladimirskiy, Stuart Gabel and Niall Keegan to provide online backup systems to SMEs. This soon transitioned into hosting and managing virtual infrastructure.

The company deployed its flagship product, PrivateCloud, in 2007. In January2014, the company secured $2.4 million in Series A funding from MK Captial, which allowed the company to expand and move from Lincolnwood, IL to Skokie, IL and rebrand their solution as Nerdio.

In July 2014, the company was named Premium Solutions Provider by the American Bar Association. As a part of its agreement with ABA, Adar provided webinars to be published on ABA's Law Practice Magazine as well as a Chicago Tech Show in April 2015.

The Adar PrivateCloud was nominated for the CityLights Rising Star Award in July 2015. Adar’s CEO, Vadim Vladimirskiy, was nominated for the CityLights Technologist of the Year Award.

Nerdio has earned a Net Promoter Score of 75.

Adar, Inc. has been featured in Inc, Bloomberg and other mainstream media. The service has nearly reached a petabyte of data transfer each month and is growing further.

Nerdio
Adar’s main product, Nerdio, is cloud-hosted IT-as-a-Service. It uses natively-encrypted PCoIP technology to host a remote desktop session, which allows users to log in and access resources from many devices including HTML5-capable web browsers. Nerdio uses VMware vSphere technology to create virtual serverinfrastructure in a cloud-hosted environment. Access is provided through Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). A golden image is created to standardize the virtualdesktop environment, which includes all applications needed to access network resources. Nerdio’s data centers natively encrypt data-at-rest and use military-grade physical security measures.

One of Nerdio’s key features is its centralized, managed solution. A Virtual CIO is provided to clients to strategically plan an optimal configuration. Software is collated and managed by Nerdio, including patches, upgrades, and compatibility testing. The virtual and physical architecture of each client’s configuration is constantly monitored for performance and anomalies, and any problems are investigated and corrected.

Nerdio can be used from any location and device with internet access. Nerdio also provides a network infrastructure with a 10GbE network backbone to eliminate any noticeable latency. A private VLAN and isolated server environment is created for each company, including a virtual firewall, which supports intrusion prevention, content filtering and gateway antimalware. Encrypted Virtual Private Network (VPN) tunnels are configured between the data center and client offices to facilitate secure, remote access to network resources.

Nerdio has three service plans: Professional, Performance, and Enterprise. Each plan comes with a set of desired features and backup strategy. The Enterprise plan focuses on highest security as well as an extra Disaster Recovery option.

Features
The service comes with the following features:
 * Windows desktop environment - 7 or 8.1 experience
 * Dedicated virtual desktop per user – up to 4CPUs/8GB RAM, 200GB SSD, 1000mbps NIC, and quad-monitor support
 * Software packages
 * Security and data protection (natively encrypted PCoIP protocol)
 * Management & monitoring
 * Maintenance
 * Mobile access and connectivity (via browsers or apps)
 * Email and communications (mailbox, Skype for business, unlimited email archive)
 * Help desk support

Server Infrastructure
The servers provide the following capabilities to users:
 * Windows Server 2012 R2 server-side environment


 * SSD-accelerated SAN storage


 * Built on VMware vSphere and Horizon View architecture
 * Redundancy with High Availability (HA) and Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS)
 * Unlimited virtual servers – within vRAM limits
 * Up to 20GB and 2GB for each user of server vRAM
 * Up to 200GB and 20GB for each user of SSD-accelerated SAN storage for servers
 * Dedicated Active Directory
 * Dedicated file server that provides group-level and user-level file security
 * Dedicated application servers and dedicated database servers
 * Pre-configured HIPAA-compliant privacy and security protocols
 * VMware Horizon View Security Gateway in DMZ and Connection Manager on LAN
 * vSphere Web client access to virtual server management
 * Pre-configured ADFS Proxy Server in DMZ and Active Directory Federation Service (ADFS) for Office 365 SSO

Network Infrastructure

 * 10GbE network backbone
 * Isolated private VLAN
 * Dedicated Fortigate virtual firewall – Includes intrusion prevention, content filtering and gateway antimalware
 * LAN for internal workloads and DMZ for publicly facing servers
 * High bandwidth internet connectivity

Software Suites
The following software suites are provided by Nerdio:
 * Microsoft Office 365 to be installed on up to five machines (and unlimited mobile devices) for each user
 * Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, and Access
 * Microsoft OneDrive with up to 1TB storage for every user
 * Share large files with users outside of organization
 * Synch files from user’s virtual desktop to local computer to be worked on while offline
 * SharePoint Online
 * Kaseya Remote Management platform for monitoring of servers and desktops and providing remote support to users
 * Automatic weekly software updates
 * Employee Productivity Tracking (optional)
 * Firefox, Chrome, NitroPDF, Notepad++, and other freeware productivity tools
 * Most importantly – support for existing (or new) Windows or Linux applications

Virtual Desktop Specifications

 * Dedicated virtual desktop for each user – up to 4CPUs/8GB RAM, 200GB SSD, 1000mbps NIC, and quad-monitor support
 * Available in two Windows desktop flavors –7 or 8.1 – based on Windows Server 2008 R2 and 2012 R2 operating system
 * The desktop is accessible via a client side application, HTML5-based browser, or mobile app
 * Natively-encrypted PCoIP protocol
 * Golden Image template configured for unique network environment to facilitate deploying new desktops
 * Renders ready-to-click, up to 1000mbps internet connection

Email and Communications

 * 50GB Exchange Mailbox
 * Unlimited personal email archive for users requiring extra storage
 * Mimecast email archiving, filtering and encryption
 * Skype for Business
 * Site-to-site IPSec VPN encrypted communication between offices