Archive for September, 2008

Is that the news in your pocket?

September 19th, 2008

These days it seems like everyone’s got a BlackBerry, iPhone or other data-enabled mobile device.  The whole internet in your pocket!  For those of us in IT these devices can provide real business value, enabling us to communicate via email, IM, text, and phone no matter where we are.  The actual value though, is all relative to how you use it or as in many cases, don’t use it. 

In a blog I posted yesterday, I wrote about how easy it is to fall behind in IT if you don’t put forth some effort to keep up.  With the whole internet available on your phone, you now have the opportunity to ‘keep up’ even if you’re not at your computer.  But how could I possibly manage navigating so many tech sites on my slow little phone?  It’s tedious enough to check 10 news sites a day on my giant monitor at work, nevermind a 2″ phone LCD, so to be honest I don’t think I’d use my phone all that much for reading tech news. » Read more: Is that the news in your pocket?

VMWare VI and iSCSI, a match made in…wait, what?

September 18th, 2008

About a year ago I was faced with the reality that we’ll keep needing more servers, and that after 3 years we have to start paying to renew the warranties.  Combined with the fact that our resource utilization on most of our servers was lllllooooowwwww, it became pretty obvious that we needed to make a change (we can believe in! lol).  The answer to our problems: Virtualization.  Duh.

We already had two standalone VMWare ESX servers running production servers and I couldn’t be happier, so the decision to use VMWare as the platform for a large-scale (ok it’s just large-scale to us) virtualization initiative was a no-brainer.  We ordered 4 Dell rack servers with ESX 3 Enterprise, and a 7TB EqualLogic PS400E iSCSI SAN, to be connected using Procurve 2810-48 switches on both the network and iSCSI side  with separate switches for each.  I set it all up and started migrating physical servers into the virtual environment.  Abso-freaking-lutely awesome! » Read more: VMWare VI and iSCSI, a match made in…wait, what?

Resistance is futile. Seriously.

September 18th, 2008

I’m very anti-trend for most things of a social nature, including blogging.  I formerly viewed blogging as a means for people to listen to themselves talk, and I don’t really like talking.  I have resisted blogging successfully until now, but recently I’ve become aware of the value of (some) blogs.  

The backstory on how I came to this moment is short and sweet (yay!).  I’m a Network Manager with a decent technical background and I’ve always relied partly on the experience of others to educate myself when embarking on projects that involve technologies that I’m unfamiliar with.  I know, that was a long sentence.  In the recent past, a lot of that information has found its way into my brain by way of blogs.  People have shared their valuable experiences and I have learned from them.  I have valuable experiences from time to time, and this will be where I publish them for the world to see.  …or ignore.  People may find my stories pointless, or completely unhelpful, but hopefully this won’t be entirely in vain.

I leave you now with a blanket disclaimer – I have but a high school education and English was never a good subject for me, and so I am prone to poor spelling and grammar.  I am also rather opinionated and intolerant of others’ flaws, but I do my best to keep my outrage in check.  Please excuse me of these shortcomings.

Josh Currier - Blogged