Search results matching tags 'networking', 'internet explorer', and 'Hardware'

Can your data center handle a hurricane? Ours can

Keith Combs — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 08:00:00 GMT

Usually we discuss hurricane or typhoon force winds in the warm tropical climates of the world. Well, unless you haven't been paying attention, Seattle and surrounding areas got hammered about 24 hours ago and a lot of essential services are still being affected. People got killed and the area will take days to recover. I am sad about that.

From an IT perspective, it's been interesting to watch from 1600 miles away. It has effected some of our services. We canceled the webcasts on Friday. My blog pictures are gone because my ISP has been done due to a lack of power. Power in our office buildings in Redmond is sparse but a few folks did find places to jack in and get power.

One thing that has not been down is email. In fact, many of our internal servers have been up round the clock. I've been using email all day. I submitted an order for some software and hardware for a project. I attended LiveMeeting online conferences to discuss our launch events. I've been in and out of our sharepoint and file servers via VPN all day. In fact, I'm pulling a massive content session off a server in the Redmond data center as we speak using a multithreaded copy tool and it's clipping along at about 650k per second.

Now lets reflect upon that for a second... We have literally thousands of servers in the data center and from where I sit, there has been zero impact to my day. When people talk about mission critical, this is what it's all about. Those services above are using Microsoft email, web, database and portal services all run in a data center of dedicated IT Pros.

In short, the Microsoft IT folks freaking rock baby!!!

I'm sure we'll have all kinds of interesting stories about this storm. It's sad to see there was loss of life. It's also sad so many people are going to be inconvenienced for many days ahead. I hope the recovery is swift, and Seattle people can have a decent Christmas.

Watching the TechED 2006 action poolside

Keith Combs — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 07:00:00 GMT

Get your frozen margarita, dual core laptop and favorite rubber ducky and head to the pool. Might as well since this year you’ll be able to watch and listen to the festivities on the http://VirtualTechEd.com website. It’ll be interesting to see how much of the show, seminars and “social” events are actually broadcast.

I would recommend tuning into the opening keynote on 6/11 at 7pm EST. We’ll have Ray Ozzie, Bob Muglia and Chris Capossela showing off some kewl stuff. Maybe they’ll do some of those kewl virtualization demos, or something fascinating from Windows Vista. It sure would be kewl if they did a BDD of Halo 3 to 1000 workstations and waiting TechEd gamers. Now that my friends is business desktop deployment. Time to get down to business fragging.

And yes, this is a current shot of the homepage at virtualteched.com from my patio. The laptop is on battery so the brightness is a bit low and obviously the exposure is set for the background, not the black Lenovo Thinkpad T60 in the foreground. The picture doesn’t do the pool justice but as you’ll recall, it’s big enough for a few of your friends. Sorry, you can’t see the “refreshments” just to the left of the laptop. Gotta go work on on some important business.

Got a phat internet connection? Download Windows Vista Beta 2 now!!!

Keith Combs — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 07:00:00 GMT

So I missed the date by a few hours, but you can help us bring the internet to it’s knees by downloading Windows Vista Beta 2 today!!! Ok, depending on your connection, maybe not today but hopefully shortly there after. After the download is complete burn the .iso image to DVD and you’ll have a shiny new operating system to test.

Go to http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/preview.mspx and decide if you want to order the DVD kit or download the bits right now.

As you can see, this is a rather large download so you’ll need to be patient with it. It might make more sense for you to simply order the DVD. The price will vary by region but to give you an idea, it’s $6 for the DVD, $4 for shipping and some taxes for me here in sunny 100 degree Texas. That’s slightly over $10 if you want to conserve bandwidth.

UPDATE: Well, we’ll hardly bring the internet to its knees when we get these. I was going through the process of trying the download for myself (so I could share your pain), and I got the lovely message to the right (click the thumb for better detail).

You can’t really read it, but it has bad news. I basically says our data center is a bit busy right now.

Now I’m really going to try to download the whole thing to see how long it takes. With my 15meg connection, it should take about an hour. Place yer bets.