Amazing Wireless Information

I’ve really been wrapping my mind around the information that we are getting daily from Airwave. I am amazed at the level of information that is being captured and reported. I don’t think we were expecting the number of devices connecting to our network when started our design plans over two years ago. IOS Devices are slightly ahead of Android but when you aggregate iPhone, iPads and iPods they are clearly the largest device we are seeing. Once you add OS X, Apple devices are clearly ahead of every other device.

So what can we take from this? The BYOD phenomenon is just beginning. Apple has captured and will continue to capture significant mind share.

The number speak for themselves.

Additionally we hit a peak today of 800 users.  Thats interesting after only being officially up an running for two weeks.

I can see the need to increase our public border ISP contract when we return from the holidays.

 

 

Juniper Rocks Our WAN

We recently completed our WAN Deployment with a BANG!!!!

We originally were only connecting all 5 of our remote sites with Verizon TLS Connections with Juniper Routers. Our integration partner rethought the deployment as we rolled out secondary connections with Comcast. We now have two routes to our main site via two distinct carriers. This was a major win for us in the connectivity space. I’m glad we choose Juniper for our WAN routers and replaced all of legacy Cisco and Nortel Routers.

Better DNS and DHCP

We are officially running away from our Nortel Netid DNS / DHCP solution to Infoblox.

We had planned to implement next year but BIND 4.X  vulnerabilities made it happen a.little sooner.  Plus the explosion of devices on our new Aruba Networks wireless.

Exciting times and the chance to provide better service.

Today Begins a New Day

Today Begins a New Day, a photo by marrngtn (Manuel) on Flickr.

We have begun our Aruba Project. The project will consist of Dual 10 GigE Controllers, Juniper UAC, 384 802.11n APs, 6 Remote Sites with Aruba Controllers and 8 802.11n APs.

Hopefully we will stop the wiring madness and contract our wired plant and from this day forward build out this wireless network.

We have a great start and hope to keep it moving forward.

When a six year old Shark has indigestion

When a six year old Shark has indigestion a photo by marrngtn (Manuel) on Flickr.

Our IBM ESS 800 has been running with out both controllers since Friday last week. Today in effort to bring the unit back online to its full operational state we started to experience problems. The unit has been running since January 2004 without a single outage of service. Sure disks have failed but usually a technicians shows up with a drive and we dont miss a beat.

I think the Shark is jealous of the nSeries taking on more and more duties in our infrastructure.

Attending Data ONTAP Class Today

Feeling that maybe the nSeries from IBM wasn’t a smart idea after all. As an IBM customer I can’t access the wealth of information on the. NetApp NOW site.

Hopefully there is an IBM equivalent.

Obama targets data centers for energy cuts – FederalTimes.com

Obama targets data centers for energy cuts – FederalTimes.com.

“One way to get there will be to curb energy consumption in data centers — facilities that house computer servers and related systems. Data centers account for about 2 percent of all electricity consumed in the U.S. — roughly equivalent to the entire airline industry — and can consume up to 100 times more energy than the standard office building. What’s more, consumption is expected to double by 2011, according to federal statistics. The government owns and operates roughly 10 percent of the country’s data centers and servers, according to an Environmental Protection Agency estimate based on 2006 data.”

Interesting Article

Training for NetApp

Hey quick update, we have the storage in and configured but now we need to get some training.

I think I need to get a customized training class so that we can hit all the major points for the entire staff.

We need NetApp Dataontap General, CIFS, NFS and VMWARE ESX w/NFS.

If anyone has any recommendations on training or trainers let me know. I want to bring it on site.

Initial Disk Layout for nSeries 6040 A20

View this document on Scribd

GigE Config for nSeries/NetApp Cluster

I’ve been reading the forums and blogs but not really seeing any best practices or thoughts about configuring the ethernet ports on the nSeries/NetApp.  I’ve found the IBM Red Book for securing the device but really a guide for configuring the ethernet access.  Whether they can be trunked, VLAN Tagging and ACLs.