latest news

September 2007

Work continues on implementation planning and testing ; data integrity control documentation . Additional work on firewalls with mainframes moving into test environment from production.

August 2007

WAN Accelerator testing moves to a close with selection of the Silverpeak NX8500 as the platform of choice for Doubletake and other types of network traffic. This device delivers superior performance while being deceptively simple - it only features a single proxy for CIFS traffic (owing to its complexity) , remaining a 'traffic agnostic' for everything else where it works solely at Layer 3.

Mirroring performance of Doubletake is still not optimal. Discussions continue with Doubletake developers about methods of improving the time to remirror across wide area network links.

Work continues on a redundant VMWare ESX Virtualcenter infrastructure based around HP cClass Bladeservers replacing a previous VC infrastructure running on VMs.

July 2007

A healthcheck and performance analysis on a client's EMC SAN reveals very poor performance. The route to optimisation involves multiple steps and storage reconfiguration for each server migrated into the test environment through disk alignment and correct offsetting from the partition table. At the end of this process, measurable performance through the HBAs reaches 700Mb/sec - almost a seventy fold improvement.

WAN Accelerator testing begins looking at devices from Expand, Citrix, Cisco, Silverpeak and Riverbed.

June 2007

The feasibility of migrating a 500 core compute cluster based around bladeservers with Opteron processors is being investigated. Staged rental and staged return following migration of a portion of the infrastructure is the proposed method, with the client looking to move up to 50-60 blades each month to completion. A US-based bladeserver rental partner is found to assist with this transition work.

May 2007

A design for an email infrastructure is submitted to a client this month encompassing redundant mail servers with clustering, multiple web servers, instant messaging, blackberry and links to back-end databases.

Apr 2007

An additional shipment of 70 blade and rackmount servers is procured and installed into 2 datacentres. Firmware and management consoles are configured using scripts. Work continues on deployment of management software including HP SIM, McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (Anti Virus) and SAN management.

Mar 2007

A consoliated SQL server infrastructure, with resilience provided by SQL log shipping is signed off by the client. Implementation starts with a test environment on blade servers. Elsewhere, a Unicenter environment design is submitted to a client, with the common object repository split between 2 sites.

Feb 2007

A large shipment of 115 blade and rackmount servers is procured and installed . Extensions to the client's naming convention are proposed. Designs for uplink cabling, initial firmware requirements are submitted for review.

Jan 2007

A small initial order for blade and rackmount servers are installed in the first of two datacentres. Initial core environment is built on physical and virtual machine (VM) Windows 2003 servers. The VMs are hosted on VMWare ESX 3.01.

Dec 2006

Preparation for hardware orders continues at a major client. Spectracom NTP appliances and Servertech PDUs are installed in HP racks.