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August 2007 |
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Our last newsletter discussed information overload and advised on classifying information in 4 categories: Essential, Desirable, Maybe and Junk. We advised that you give attention in the same descending sequence from Essential Information (immediate attention) to Junk (delete). You are the judge and you do the classification of emails in your folder on the fly. For example, which category does this Compucon User Community Newsletter fall into? We cannot classify it for you but we have done the homework to make sure that this newsletter contains information that is Desirable to our readers and that our readers will gain some value from reading it.
The Parliament has enacted an act called The Unsolicited Electronic Message Act. From 5 September 2007, people in New Zealand who are convicted of spamming will be fined up to $200K and companies up to $500K. Whilst this Act may help reduce spam coming into our PC by 10% (90% of spam comes from overseas), this Act also reminds us to email out carefully. The Act requires that we email only to people who have given us express or inferred consent, that we explain why we send out this email and that we provide an Unsubscribe reminder. Most importantly the content of the email must not contain rogue information to mislead people into buying something. Let us know if you wish to understand this topic further for your own applications.
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August 2007 |
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The heading does not refer to having someone to back you up when you go on holidays. It refers to backing up the most valuable asset of your personal business asset- the data and files that you have collected or created in the course of doing business. Most executives carry a laptop these days. Laptops still use the standard type of hard disk which is based on electro-mechanical and magnetic technologies. A hard disk is like the phonograph that our seniors played their music with in the 50s or 60s of the last century. Imagine carrying the phonograph on the road and running in on the go. The read/write head (stylus of the phonograph) can crash onto the plate easily as they are only nanometers apart (touching for phonograph). A bang on the table will surely hurt if not kill the hard disk if your laptop is running at that time. How often did your laptop hard disk die in the past? What is the consequence if you lost the hard disk? The answer is Back Up your data and files. Your laptop supplier can repair the hardware and can re-install the application software. If the hard disk is dead, they cannot recover your data if you do not have a back up copy. There are many ways of backing up data and files. The most common one is to use USB thumb drives that are as large as 4GB these days. Another way is to burn CD or even DVD as DVD has 5GB of capacity. However, how much time is the back up process and how often do you do it? We have come across a new approach recently. It is fast and can be scheduled. It is also an assisted process and can be said as automatic. More importantly, the back up copy is ENCRYPTED and only you can decrypt it to see it. If you wish to learn more about this, email
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for more information.
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August 2007 |
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VMWARE Server Usage Experience...
It is a free version. Marcus Osborne of Quattro Enterprises Ltd has evaluated the latest version 1.0.3 with SBS Server 2003 as the Host. The software did what its vendor has claimed and Marcus recommended it as a useful tool to his peers, especially for remote support access and non-critical systems. It is a good environment for testing client software, for providing back up copies of client systems, and as a platform for exploring further potential applications of machine virtualization. A word of caution is on licensing if multiple Microsoft software installations are involved and if you intend to deploy it for client use. Server virtualization is a hot topic at present and a lot of developments are still happening in the background. The CPD peer group will continue the exploration path on 29 August 2007.
W2003 and SBS2003 Deployment Challenge Case Study...
Ratan Prakash of BCS Computer Solutions Limited explained to his peers in our last CPD Seminar how he resolved a solution puzzle for a customer. He inherited a scenario where the client has already spent $70K on event reservation and resource scheduling software systems running on a legacy PC with SBS2000. His predecessor bought a low cost server (brand is HP) inclusive of SBS2003 Standard that was intended for replacing the legacy PC. It appears that the job of replacing the legacy server is straight forward but why did the client change guard for this little project? Ratan found that the new server has minimum hardware and the reseller buy price would be $2307 + GST for upgrading it to 1GB RAM and 2* 73GB SCSI. The upgrade price was higher than a brand new Compucon SX Workgroup Server! Furthermore SBS2003 does not provide Terminal Services that would best serve the needs of the 4 remote sites of the client. A Compucon SX WGS with 4GB and 2*400GB running Terminal Services and costing $3145 + GST is now in service! The price difference between upgrading an older & less feasible HP and the much higher spec Compucon server was so small that spending more on an already paid up machine could not be justified. Whatever looks cheap is not cheap and whatever looks expensive may be the least expensive. It depends on who you deal with. Ratan has also found that this client is very suspicious of IT People as a group due to bad experience. The talk was telling.
Preventive Maintenance (PM) & Client Relationship (CR)...
We have observed that several machines sent back to TSD for fault rectification were in fact due to dirt and soil cluttering and covering the printed circuits on the motherboard/RAM and reduction of ventilation of the CPU and other components. According to our channel partners, the clients were extremely unhappy during the period leading to the eventual failure of the machines and had transferred a lot of stress and threats to them. What have we learned from this observation? Most of our channel partners are more than capable of doing routine maintenance on the machines inclusive of servers and desktops. Routine maintenance includes hardware and software. Just by implementing a PM scheme, you will earn more money and peace and improve CR, and the customer will gain too. Do it now.
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August 2007 |
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What have Schools Gained from School TECH?
(For ICT Management)
The conference was held 2 weeks ago and some vendors rated the event as successful. The basis for claiming success or failure is the number of visitors going through the trade display. This basis is obviously not a concern for participants from schools. The Ministry has indicated that the purpose of sponsoring the conference is to facilitate more interactions between schools and vendors. What have schools gained from these interactions? Have schools gained enough to justify the time and effort of attending? How would schools use the gain for improving ICT standards in the school? Compucon being one of the participants has made the following observations. Schools want to know what they do not know and to consolidate what they already know. The scope can be as shallow as which vendors provide the cheapest products or as deep as which vendors will assist the school in operating ICT in an integrated manner. The trade display is a forum for horizontal interfaces whereas the workshops are opportunities for obtaining vertical information. Vertical information refers to background or details of technologies and how they support promises to schools. Horizontal interfaces are less technology related and are more people related. Without doubt, both are important for schools to obtain a complete picture. From our direct experience, we are pleased to report that many participants have been interactive in our workshop on Remote Management & Server Technologies, and they visited our display afterwards to obtain the other half of information. This observation indicates that some schools will make an effort to make up the knowledge gap if they identify any. The ability of the vendor to transfer knowledge to schools is still very much in demand. It is a pleasant finding. On the issue of implementing ICT in an integrated manner- install good tools considering the purposes of student learning and facilitating teacher teaching, principal managing and technician maintaining at the same time, observations indicated that most schools were not quite there yet.
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August 2007 |
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How to Handle Exponential Growth of Data Storage?
(For Network Administrators)
The immediate answer is Storage Area Networks (SAN). Wrong! SAN does suit many organisations but we have to question the fitness for purpose for schools. SAN is a separate network from the network that connects all servers and workstations together. SAN connects only servers together and provides low latency data transmission to servers. It is based on a different technology than Ethernet although a recent development of iSCSI has brought Ethernet back into the picture. What about Network Attached Storage (NAS)? NAS is suitable for data archiving and is very low cost to implement. It does not need a separate network and can be readily installed at any point of the existing Ethernet network. Performance in terms of responsiveness and speed of data transfer is not high. It is suitable for saving files and data which are not needed frequently or urgently. What about Direct Attached Storage (DAS)? It has been the most used but most taken for granted. It is most used because every server and PC has DAS. It is most taken for granted due to previous technology limitations. We rely on SCSI for Server DAS. SCSI is an elegant technology in terms of data storage across multiple drives. It is not too expensive but we seldom install more than 8 drives per server for reasons of stability. Now the technology has improved and SCSI is evolving into Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). We have already supplied Compucon servers that hold 16 low cost SATA drives each with 750GB. Both servers have built in redundancy and hot spare. Also they are not expensive. See the attached file for further information on the background and development of the new technology.
PDF: 2007-08 "Storage for Schools" presentation
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