Feb 07

End of a printer

My old trusty Epson melted last summer and I’ve finally got around to buying a replacement, for a change, I got a Canon, to be more specific, an MG6150, what an awesome Multi Function printer!  Scan / Copy & Print, plus its WiFi enabled so I can hide it away anywhere I like in the house, result!

First glance, looks superb, loving the gloss black finish (apart from the finger prints), seems to print rather quickly, photo print quality is very good, scanning quality is good, and the ‘quiet’ mode is a neat feature.   Comes with several separate inks, and one larger sized grey/black for black and white printing, so should save on ink costs hopefully. 

More news once I’ve used it a bit more.

Feb 07

Too many cables – HP Virtual Connect is here to help!

Have you got a HP blade chassis with a million connections coming from the back side pass-through interconnects, or even some sort of Cisco/HP/Brocade Network/SAN switch in there which is maxed out and you have to configure the SAN and/or Network each time you add or replace a server?  Virtual Connect Flex Fabric solves this issue.

HP Virtual Connect Flex Fabric allows one time cabling (wire-once) between the edge networks (SAN & Network), it consolidates interconnect devices at a staggering 4:1 ratio (Each Flex Fabric device can replace up to 3 Ethernet and 1 FC interconnect) and you only require 2 of these VC’s to connect your blade chassis to your network AND fibre infrastructure.

Using Flex-10 technology with multi-protocol Ethernet, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCOE) and Accelerated iSCSI, these modules converge traffic over high speed 10 Gb connections to servers with HP FlexFabric Adapters (Converged Network Adapters, CNA). Each module provides 4 adjustable connections (3 data and 1 storage or all data) to each 10 Gb server port.

Virtual Connect uses the concepts of ‘Profiles’ (a selection of networks, FC & Ethernet based) that can be assigned to specific servers (for example, server 1 could always connect to the PROD Network and the PROD Fabric, whereas server2 connects to the DEV Network & Fabric).  The virtual connect then uses a pool of WWN and MAC (unique id’s within the IP & SAN networks) and assigns them to a specific bay.  The network & storage admins then only needs to configure their ‘side of the fence’ using these pool of WWN & MAC addresses.  If the server ever needs to be replaced it can simply be removed from the chassis, a new server installed and VC will automatically assign the WWN & MAC that were on the original server, the storage & network admins don’t need to do a thing, this makes rip & replace very easy.   You can pre-provision these profiles so any new server install is just a case of plugging it in. There is no delay waiting for networking or SAN connections to be completed. 

If you suddenly require more compute resource on your SQL service, assign a profile to a spare blade and using Boot From SAN this server can then be added to the farm of SQL servers and add its additional resources as and when required.  No complicated work to get this setup, its a simple as assigning a profile and booting it up.

Blade solutions are all about flexible infrastructure, faster deployments, & higher availability. HP Virtual Connect Flex Fabric helps deliver on all of these goals, and it would be a great advantage to any infrastructure these are deployed into.  Would I recommend it? A year or so ago, my answer would have been no, but now, definitely, there are so many positives that you gain from using these this really is a no brainer when looking at buying interconnect devices for your HP Bladesystem infrastructure.

Feb 07

Cloud Security

Just what certification should you cloud provider have?

SAS-70, verifies the service providers control processes, but these are defined by the service provider!  Customers have to determine if these controls are adequate

ISO 27001, specifies how service providers should handle security controls & risk assessment, again, these controls are self-defined by the provider.

The Trusted Security Certification Program is being developed by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). It’s Vendor neutral and covers security, access & compliance management practises, it will include certification criteria & reference models from existing standards.

Feb 04

VMware to Go bro

It’s been out a while and it’s moved to PRO, but has anyone actually used VMware Go?  It’s a web based wizard driven interface for those SMB’s and smaller companies to guide users of any expertise though the installation of vSphere hypervisors

  • Remotely deploy vSphere hypervisor whilst ensuring compatibility with the built in hardware check
  • Create virtual machines from within it, using VMware P2V Converter; simplify software deployments using pre-configured virtual appliances, migrate from older versions of ESX to ESXi
  • Patch management built in, view missing patches and deploy them instantly
  • Software license management, scan VM’s to view all software deployed within the environment
  • Hardware asset management, create a database of all server configuration details, track asset modifications

For more details visit: http://www.vmware.com/products/go/

Feb 04

WiKi Traffic Car Parking Sensor – Gadgets at Play.com (UK)

Bought one of these… just because I could 🙂

WiKi Traffic Car Parking Sensor – Gadgets at Play.com (UK).