Taking Overland SAN for a Test Drive

We received an Overland Ultimas 1200 about a week ago that our vendor is loaning us so we can take it for a test drive.  This 9TB beauty is pretty quick.

Initial Impressions:

• It was very quick and easy to setup.
• Has a "fully" redundant setup, dual power supplies, controllers, etc.
• It is easily expandible via SAS interconnect to additional chassis.
• Is Fiber Channel - some of you might not like that, I'm still on the fence.
• Supports all the normal SAN stuff (Online Expansion, Snapshots, etc)

Having worked with some higher end Fiber Channel SANS in the past, this one is quite easy to setup.  Disk groups and LUN configuration can be done very easily through the integrated web interface.

We have successfully connected 2 different LUNS to our VMWARE ESX server.  Since we currently are only running 1 ESX box I can't fully test VMOTION or the other high end capabilities, but the docs say that it is all there.

I will share more thoughts later.  Right now I am really pouring over the data... ISCSI or Fiber Channel???  I know many of you are die hard ISCSI people, but I have used both, and I loved the raw speed that is there in FC... I know I probably don't need it, and with 10Gb Ethernet on the horizon who knows.

 

Oh well more to come on the SAN Saga.

TS Fay Floods My World

  Well...  I am totally flooded in my house right now.  We have been flooded in since last night.  We still have power, but internet went down earlier today, as did cable.  I am writing this through my cell phone.

Here are some photos of my house and the neighborhood.  The blessing is that we have had no damage to our home yet.  We can't drive anywhere.  The road is about 18 inches deep in water.  Some parts of our neighborhood are knee high and higher water.

Here is the street and yes that is the sidewalk completely under water.

The great news is that my server room is up and running and there is no water damage at the church. 

Home From Nicaragua

I just got home this past wednesday from a 7 day mission trip to Nicaragua.  It was a blast.  The mission team did well, the weather was good, and you could just see the hand of God over all we did.  Our team was able to do a bunch of classic mission trip activities, and I was able to re-work a bunch of the wireless network while I was there.

 

Good to be home.

Flash Streaming Launched!

This weekend we launched our new media player based on Adobe Flash Media Server 3 and our own "customized" flash swf.  The response to our "Beta" has been overwhelming.  Right now there are 88 connected via the new stream.  We are excited to add this since it expands our Mac support as well as simplifying the end user experience.  Check out the beta:

This player interface will be the new default for the entire website over the course of the next week.  If you want to see it in action head on over to http://www.calvaryccm.com

Cool Tool: IE 7 Pro

I am always in the market for something really cool that enhances the way I work on daily basis.  Enter IE7Pro, this has been a pretty cool find for me and my staff.  It adds a bunch of Firefox Features into IE7.  Now before I go any further... Please don't crucify me if you are a FireFox fan.  I have it on my laptop and I like it, but to be honest, I am still an IE man.

So IE7 Pro adds a bunch of time saving things from a fully fledged download manager, inline search, spell checking for forms( I LOVE THIS!!!), and some other cool widgets like windows resizing and just a bunch of stuff that otherwise takes lots of tools to get.

Check it out.  http://www.ie7pro.com/

Expanding Sharepoint on the Web

In a previous article I talked about how we, at CCM, have taken our Internal WSS 3.0 (Sharepoint - Free Version), and are now publishing the Church Calendar to the Internet in a live fashion using Web Services.  Yesterday was a great day for us when our programmer completed our second Sharepoint on the Web project.

One of my big pet peeves is that data should always be current and we shouldn't have to enter it more than once.  Our staff directory on the web always seemed to lag far behind all our other systems.

So enter Sharepoint.  We had already been keeping all our staff contact information in a WSS list, so to me it's only natural to connect that data to the web site as well.

After some frustration and little work we now have a fully functional staff contact list that is searchable, and always up to date on the website.  Thanks to Richie the programmer (who I am encouraging to start a blog and share more howto) for getting this all online.

Check out our new Staff Contact List on the CCM Website!

Cool Tool: Xobni

Xobni is totally changing the way I look at email.  This really cool tool that indexes and analyzes your email flow both in and out.

Check it out...  Find out who you email the most!  Find and track how many emails you send and receive from each contact.  This is a really cool analytics engine and indexer for Outlook...

www.xobni.com