November – 2009 – TechVirtuoso

KVM over IP and a Bad Demo

November 26th, 2009 at 5:45 PM 1 Comment Frank Owen

We are going through a major Avaya upgrade at work. Since we are moving to VoIP we are making changes to our network as well as some of the infrastructure to prepare for the upgrades. We have a bit left over from the budget so we are trying to fit a KVM over IP solution into the current budgeted numbers and I can tell you it has been pretty challenging.

I have previously used the Startech KVM over IP product as well as one of their switched PDU’s and I was not impressed. The pricing fit into our budget but I didn’t want to buy crappy equipment jut because it fit into our price range. After looking through the CDW website I found a solution from Aten that I liked so I contacted my CDW rep to schedule a demo. He also said I should look at a Belkin solution and a Avocent solution all within the budget.

In the mean time Belkin had a demo available on their web site. I signed up for the demo and it worked pretty well but I was hoping for a more robust solution so I waited for the Aten demo to be setup.

The Aten demo started off like most demos, with a power point presentation written word by word by a sales representative. The technician that was supposed to be joining the call was running late and after the sales rep. finished his power point, he hunted down the technician and got him on the phone. The technician shared their screen and logged into one of their units. He jumped around a lot and the connection between him and the KVM device was severed twice during the 20 minute demo. He claimed it was network issues at his local site and nothing to do with the Aten equipment.

After the warm and fuzzy feeling disappeared after seeing the bad Aten demo I asked my CDW rep to get a representative from Avocent on the phone. We scheduled a demo with Avocent and everything went very well. I was very impressed with their product and everything worked the way it should.

I figured I would end this post with a little bit of advice to any sales representatives reading this. If someone asks for a demo of your product this is your chance to close the deal. Make sure everyone is on time, you don’t just read directly from a power point AND when it comes time to show your product it actually works. I would say if you could only choose one of these points to excel at… the last one is the most important.

Android road warrior has phone, ISO connectivity

November 23rd, 2009 at 9:42 AM 2 Comments Shane Pitman

As I stated in my previous post, I have left the world of BlackBerry and Microsoft Exchange behind and transitioned my e-mail, calendar, contacts, and mobile platform to Google Apps and Android. Doing so was no small decision, as my “day job” requires that I have access to all of these items and that they work in unison with each other, my desktop, my laptop, and that I have access to my data anywhere at any time.

I own an IT consulting firm, and as you can imagine, that means that I am not always in the office, and don’t always have connectivity available. With my BlackBerry, it was as simple as loading the Sprint SmartView software on my laptop (similar applications are provided by most carriers) and using my BlackBerry’s data connection. However, SmartView doesn’t work with the Samsung Moment, and Sprint has made the (poor) decision to do away with tethering or “Phone-As-Modem” options on their Simply Everything plans which are required plans for their smartphones. I speculate that their reason for doing away with tethering is an effort to drive customers to the increasing number of mobile broadband devices that they carry, including the new Novatel MiFi 2200 router, but I’ll save that gripe for another post.

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Goodbye RIM, Microsoft, hello Android, Google Apps

November 20th, 2009 at 1:07 AM 5 Comments Shane Pitman

Those of you who know me, know that I have been an avid BlackBerry proponent for many years. I held fast to the opinion that BlackBerry coupled with Microsoft Exchange was the solution for business mobile communications. Be it BlackBerry Enterprise Server or Microsoft ActiveSync, I held steadfast in my opinion that nothing could perform as well or better in maintaining perfect harmony between my desktop, my laptop, my phone, and anywhere access to my information. I am here to say, that era has ended. A moment of silence, please. Now that the mourning is over, let me tell you the changes I’ve made, how, and why.

First, let me say that I had not been looking to leave the BlackBerry/Exchange family, but I was holding out for a full screen BlackBerry with a physical keyboard, a slider if you will. Those of you who follow mobile devices closely, especially those who follow BlackBerry hardware, are well aware of the numerous design concept drawings, mock-ups, etc. of a BlackBerry slider that have been floating around for at least a year. Never revealing just exactly when we would see such a device, RIM has only been willing to confirm that several design options have been considered. This secrecy is nothing unusual among device manufacturers, but the lack of information and an opportunity provided by a competitor presents a precarious position, and, in this case, caused a long time RIM fan to jump ship.

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What the heck are we doing here?

November 19th, 2009 at 10:13 PM 1 Comment Michael Stanclift

So first off, on behalf of all of us, I want to apologize for not being around much in the last couple of months. Things of have been busy for all of us. We’ve also been trying to sort out what we’re going to do with this project.

Most of you know, when the five principles of this site left Neowin back in July, we did so with the intent of starting a new site. But without getting into all the details… life got in the way. We really want to make the project successful, but we now see that we’ve been going about it in the wrong way.

The core idea behind founding TechVirtuoso was a sound one. Business IT people talking about business IT. Or as we say on the website “Enterprise technology for and by those who live it” … the elements we’ve laid out in the original charter for this site were good, but placed us in an area that is a bit too strict for what we could be doing.

Let’s face it, none of us are reporters. We’re IT people. Us trying to “report” on events in such a neutral and unbiased way as we’ve planned out, is not only difficult for us, but isn’t that interesting to you, the reader.

So this is what TechVirtuoso will be from this point forward. A place to talk about the projects we’re working on, ideas we have, concepts we’ve developed. When we find something we find interesting, we’ll talk about it, not feeling like we have to go out and “report” about news. When we started out on this project originally I was wrong in thinking that we needed to be structured in a way that produced unopinionated content… hearing the opinion of other IT people is exactly what we’re going to be about from this point forward.

Obviously, we need to talk about news, but why not do so in a way that allows us to show others about ourselves, and the things that interest us… instead of just being drones? When I think about what I’d want to see in a business IT site, it’s not just press releases and the latest buzzwords. I want to see how it’s going to help me do my job better. How it’s going to make my users happy — or really anger them. It would be much more interesting to others, to see how real IT people in other areas are actually using that technology.

From this point forward, we seek to turn this site into an “business IT lifestyle blog” … which also means talking about other non-enterprise things that we’re interested in. None of us can go home from work and turn the IT world around us off. So we’re going to talk about all the IT around us, from the perspective of an IT professional. We live in a world where business IT features quickly make their way down to the consumer world, and vice versa.

So in addition to content, we’re going to be making a few other changes around here. The layout is going to get a facelift. We’ve also turned off our forums, because we’re not in the business of building those right now.

We hope that you enjoy the new TechVirtuoso. I know we’re going to enjoy creating it.

Thanks,
Michael Stanclift
Shane Pitman
Frank Owen
Don Smith
Eric Iles

HP and Converged Infrastructure

November 4th, 2009 at 1:41 AM 3 Comments Frank Owen

HP_logo HP is announcing today HP Converged Infastructure, a group of new and revitalized HP products that will revolutionize the way IT looks at their datacenter solutions. This virtualized collection of network, storage and shared servers can be virtualy allocated to meet the growing needs of the business faster and easier than ever before.

The HP Converged Infastructure consists of four major platforms. HP Infrastructure Operating Environment, HP FlexFabric, HP Virtual Resource Pools and HP Datacenter Smart Grid.

TechVirtuoso was able to speak to Lee Johns on a conference call earlier today about the Storage Works products that would fall under the HP Virtual Resource Pools category. The three products that the call focused on were the HP StorageWorks X9000 Network Storage System Family, HP StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform v3.0 andHP StorageWorks Cluster Extension EVA software with Microsoft Hyper-V Live Migration.

The HP StorageWorks X9000 family leverages technology from the aquisition of IBRIX and can scale up to 16 PetaBytes. HP is planning on an inital release of three revisions from the X9000 family available for shipment November 16th for as low as $1.50 a GB. The X9000 family includes the X9300 Network Storage Gateway; a 2 unit rack mount solution that brings scale out services to HP or 3rd Party arrays or sans, the X9320 Network Storage System; a highly available scale-out storage solution and the X9720 Network Storage System which will serve and store hundreds of terabytes or petabytes of file based data. The X9720 will ship on January 4th.

The HP StorageWorks SAN Virtualization Services Platform v3.0 (or just SVSP v3) allows IT to simplify management of HP and 3rd party SAN devices. V3 brings some major improvements to the platform including simplifing the creation of LUNS. SVSP V3 is currently available starting at $31,032 for an entry 1 terabyte configuration which includes the hardware and the SVSP VM license.

The HP StorageWorks Cluster Extension EVA software with Microsoft Hyper-V Live Migration is a new product which will give a high availability solution to Hyper-V users currently utilizing multiple EVA units. It will allow for auto-failover of application services as well as read and write enabling of remotely mirrored mir-range storage over your MAN. The HP StorageWorks Cluster Extension EVA software with Microsoft Hyper-V Live Migration will be available on November 25th for a U.S. list price of $5280.

Note: Some links may not work until HP officially announces these products. They are scheduled to release the announcement at 9:00AM 11/4/2009.