HP

Epic Technology Day a great success!

Hi folks, so as you know I work for the largest locally owned IT consulting company in Manitoba. Twice a year we hold one of the largest HP partner events in North America called Epic Technology Day. This year I did a presentation on VoIP and Wireless and I was very happy with the turnout and buzz generated by the presentation.

Well after all was said and done we broke yet another record and had our largest registration numbers yet. I just wanted to thank all of you that came out for the event and I hope to see you again in April for our next Technology Day.

If there any particular presentations you want to see at the next event, please don’t hesitate to let us know so we can help tailor the event to the needs of our customers. I hope to be presenting again at the next Tech Day and look forward to seeing you all again soon!

-RP

Aggregating links on Cisco switches

Hello again folks! So you’ve just recently got your purchase approved for a brand new set of switches and you want to find a way to increase your throughput. What do you do? You aggregate links of course!

Aggregating links is a common thing done on high end switches such as Cisco or HP switches to name a few. The idea behind it is to take two or more ports and bind them together to create a single virtual port that connects to another switch. Then you can take your traffic and shuttle it over this link.

In Cisco land this is called Etherchannel. When you create an Etherchannel, it is treated like an interface. People will commonly create Etherchannels and then trunk their vlans across this link. This allows for quite a bit of bandwidth, especially on gigabit switches. This doesn’t double your bandwidth but it does increase it by a fair bit.

You can read more about etherchannel here.

-RP

EDS face more pay cuts

So this just surfaced across the web in the news. It seems EDS employees are facing more pay cuts again. Seriously?

Last I checked, the government told us that Canada is out of a recession. It seems like the US part of HP is blindly sending down paycuts to their Canadian bretheren. You do realize that we are a different country and are actually not doing so bad in comparison? Maybe you want to look at the numbers before doing this sort of thing.

I seriously disagree with the amount of paycuts that have been hitting EDS, it’s not fair to the employees that have been working their butts off for the company and making them money all these years. There are lots of places where they could cut but just don’t want to so instead the little guy gets the shaft.

Read more about it here.

-RP

The importance of wireless site surveys

Hello again! Here’s some more information for you techs delving into the world of wireless. Wireless site surveys! One of the things I find often overlooked when implementing a wireless strategy, is the lack of one! Even when people listen to me about putting in the proper access points and controllers, sometimes they just don’t think about placement.

Now I don’t understand why on earth you wouldn’t do a wireless site survey. A proper survey can save you tons of headaches for your users and for yourself, as well as save you on countless hours of troubleshooting. Access points should not be installed into an organization with no regard to placement, that’s just a dumb idea. You’ll more than likely end up by way too many access points to deal with a given situation and end up wasting your money.

Instead, you should hire a wireless certified individual or company and have them come in and run a wireless site survey. They will come in and scan the surrounding area that you need to have wireless coverage in and they will present you with a nice report that shows you exactly how many access points you need, and where to place them for maximum coverage. Then from this report, you will have a good idea of which wireless controllers and access points you’ll need to buy.

Remember, don’t go into wireless blindly, take your time, do the proper legwork and install a solution that will make your users happy and make you look great!

-RP

Implementing wireless in your business

Hello again folks, once again I wanted to talk a little bit about wireless connectivity. More and more, people are finding that they are requiring wireless access in their organization. Unfortunately a good majority of them are going about it the wrong way.

What do I mean by this? Well let’s take a small business for example, one with just a few people and a very small sized office. If they need wireless access all they need to do is go to their nearest electronics retailer and buy a small Linksys or D-Link wireless router and hook it up and they’re good to go. Simple, effective,  cheap, not so bad at all.

But now take the slightly larger business, with many people and a larger office than a single wireless router or access point can serve. I’ve seen way too many people try and setup wireless by buying multiple home based wireless routers and spreading them across their premises with no rhyme or reason to try and get the best coverage. Also the larger the building(s), the more management the administrator ends up having by having to go and configure each access point individually.

Never fear, there is a better way. Our friends at Cisco and HP(technology recently acquired from Colubris) both have competing solutions that will serve your needs. The idea is to use a Wireless Controller device which you configure which then in turn controls your access points by use of LWAPP(Lightweight Access Point Protocol). LWAPP allows you to control and configure multiple access points from a centrally accessed wireless controller. The controller pushes out it’s configuration to all of these access points making administration quite easy.

-RP

Epic Technology Day is here again!

Hi folks, once again it’s time for Epic Technology Day! This is the day long conference my company holds twice a year. Unfortunately due to many ongoing projects I won’t be presenting this year, but I will be in attendance.

Lots of new things to look forward to at Tech Day this year, including the Cisco Now Van which will showcase some of the cool equipment from Cisco.

Also VMware will be there as per usual speaking about their great products. HP and Citrix will also be there touting their wares. Technology day is a great opportunity to network in the Manitoba IT community and learn a lot about what’s new and wonderful in the world of technology. You can register for it here.

Hope to see you there!

-RP

Cisco UCS Announcement

Hi folks, today Cisco made their big announcement regarding their Unified Computing System. At the heart of this system is Cisco’s new UCS 5100 Blade Server Chassis. This chassis can hold up to 8 blade servers and 2 fabric extenders within a 6 RU enclosure.

UCS is being marketed as an all in one enclosure that contains many components such as the blade enclosure, the servers, fabric interconnects, a management module etc.

Cisco is going head to head with their long time partners IBM and HP by making this announcement. It remains to be seen if Cisco can make any headway in a market that they historically have not competed in during these hard economic times.

Win or lose, Cisco is sure to turn some heads. One thing is for sure, Cisco has always been one to innovate, and will most certaintly keep everyone on their toes by entering this space.

You can read more about UCS here.

-RP

HP and EDS Pay Cuts

Hi folks, the recent pay cut announcement at HP and EDS has been taken with mixed reactions. If you haven’t heard yet, they have announced that workers will be receiving a pay cut in lieu of layoffs.

Now I don’t know about you but in an industry where workers are already underpaid to begin with, the prospect of a pay cut is that much more crazy. Of course on the other side of the coin, would you rather lose your job or lose some of your pay? For most people it’s almost the same thing because they need that pay to make ends meet.

The executives have also taken a pay cut as well. Unfortunately that isn’t being taken very well by some employees and they are concerned about this whole situation regardless of that fact. I sincerely hope everything works out well in the end and that all the people involved are able to keep their jobs. I also hope that once the tough times are over, that HP rewards their employees for their loyalty and hard work.

-RP

Deduplication, a great way to store stuff.

Hi folks, long time no talk, I’m sitting here enjoying my vacation and it’s time to catch up on some blogging as it’s almost over.

So who here has heard of deduplication? Deduplication is essentially a form of single instance storage. What it allows for is the ability to store lots of data without replicating the similar pieces of data over and over again while it’s storing it. Instead there are just pointers to the duplicate pieces of data so what happens is you end up with greatly enhanced storage capacity.

The storage ratio goes along to the tune of 20 to 1 on average for most deduplication solutions out there and as large as 50 to 1 in best cas scenarios. A few companies can provide you with this solution such as HP or even Data Domain. If you haven’t had a chance to read about it, check it out!

 -RP

HP buys LeftHand Networks and Colubris

Hi folks, there’s some more news from the storage world. HP bought LeftHand Networks to the tune of $360 million dollars. Now that’s a big chunk of change. They also went out and bought Colubris. Also don’t forget their acquisition of EDS earlier this year.

HP has definitely been on an acquisition binge and that leaves one wondering what the heck are they positioning themselves for. Well the purchase of EDS is well known. That just leaves the other two. I suspect HP wasn’t happy with their current wireless strategy and would like to focus it a bit more with the purchase of Colubris which specializes in wireless technologies. I’ve worked with Colubris devices and they have a myriad of options and features not available on similar wireless devices.

The purchase of LeftHand would be to shore up their lower end iSCSI storage offerings I suspect. I’ve worked with the current HP iSCSI offerings on a regular basis so it should be interesting to see how this development plays out with the current product line.

 -RP