First Post!

So, as it happens, I’ve been doing a lot of ‘research’ lately. Such that it is, a lot of my ‘research’ ends up being on the web, and a lot of information comes from blogs, so I decided I’d best get with the program and start posting what I’ve been up to on the web as well. Not that I expect it to be interesting to anybody else, but at least I’ll start to accumulate the stuff I find somewhere more useful than a browser cache!

Right now, the primary areas of my ‘research’ are storage and virtualization. The last time I went around this merry-go-round it was VOIP, so perhaps I’ll get around to trying to consolidate some of what I’ve picked up on that front as well. We’ve recently been nailed with some hardware failures at Interlink and I’m really hoping that the latest round of storage and virtualization hype will help me to insulate us from service outages and spending the amount of time I have attempting to resurrect systems with a soldering iron and box of new fans. Interlink is a pretty small company, but we’re more and more dependant on the Internet. This puts us in an interesting position, in that we don’t really have the bankroll to play with ‘Enterprise’ hardware, but our dependance on the internet (and computing services in general) is high enough that we really can’t afford to take the usual small business ‘buy a dell and stick it in the corner and hope it doesn’t die’ route.

As it happened, VMWare had just released the final version of the their newly free ‘VMWare Server’ product when one of my machines died in the rack, and I’d been evaluating it for a while, so I got a crash course in ‘putting VMWare into production’. Unfortunately, in my case, just about every issue I’ve had with VMWare seems to be IO related, so the interest I’d had in moving beyond our Dell Windows Storage Server NAS to a real storage system was piqued.