Alien Technology

Big Move to Cloud Computing

We’ve embarked on a massive IT infrastructure change. Up until about 2 weeks ago we had 4 servers in our building. A Primary Domain Controller/ Exchange Server/ File Server, A Citrix Server, A Phone Server and a Secondary DNS Server (for our hosting). We also had 2 servers at our Data Center, One for Hosting and One for Kaseya.

We’ve now gone from 6 Servers in Total to 3 Physical Servers, total power consumption is about 25% of what it was due to the size of the servers phased out.

Using VMWare and some Jiggery-Pokery I’ve consolidated our Office Servers into Two Virtual Servers on their Own 1U server at the Data Center. All the Physical Servers in the office off and moved everyone to using Published Applications on Citrix Presentation Server 4.0. That makes a massive saving in Electricity for a company alone.

We’ve phased out the old Pentium III looking Phone Server and replaced it with a New Dual Core PC with 2GB ram, this only runs VIOspeed Pronto Server but I think will eventually be virtualized now we’ve fully switched to VOIP and scrapped the ISDN lines.

The next job is to look at putting the Memory out of the Hosting server in the Data Center into the new 1U 64-bit Server to increase it from 6GB ram to 8GB Ram, then virtualizing the Hosting Server and putting it onto this with our two office servers.

Once that’s done we can move Kaseya back to the server which it was originally on with Hosting stuff and save about 4U of space from the big over sized Dell Server in our Rack.

It’s all very exciting, Cloud computing is the future and we are embracing it early. We’ve moved all our mail to Google Apps which may end up changing as it’s really annoying how it groups emails into conversations for Web Mail. I don’t know how much we use Webmail but when you do go to use it, it’s VERY annoying.

Full Usage of Citrix, Virtual Servers and full VOIP… I thought switching to workgroups and having local profiles was a big backward step from using Exchange 2007 on a 2003 R2 domain with lots of Raid and stuff… But when you look at it like that, It’s the lightweight Key to the Future. We can now work from absolutely anywhere exactly the same as if we were in the office.

I’ve done most of this using VMWare and Tools Available from VMWare, we are looking to fully plan and roll out/ migrate to solutions like ours to other Companys. SEE CUSTARD COMPUTERS

Tags: Citrix, Cloud, Computing, Consolidation, Virtualization, VMWARE

New Look Blog

I’ve been quite busy this afternoon messing around with themes and doing a bit of photoshopping (see logo at the top of the page)

After seeing how Chris had transformed his blog into something far more interesting than just a basic wordpress blog it inspired me (forced me actually because I kept being called names for having SUCH an out of date blog and being SO far behind in the times).

I thought I’d bring a bit more media to your machines. You’ll notice I now have a gallery which I’ll slowly fill with Pictures I deem suitable.

There is also a “My Music” page which I will be putting short clips of my Productions on so that you can take a sneak peak into my ‘rough cuts‘. I’m yet to fully finish a tune but when I do it’ll be on here first. The problem is that I’m never fully happy with the over all tune. I could do a radio edit easy enough, I suppose. That’s my challenge for the rest of the week.

There is also the random photo on the right hand side which will display random photos from across my Gallery, doesn’t work so well with about 5 photos to pick from. I believe I have simplified the navigation aswell and introduced a cloud of keywords which I find quite interesting. It seems to build up a picture of what I talk about.

Tags: Blog, Cloud, Gallery, Music, New Look, Wordpress