The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog. We wish to thank all of our contributors and our readers for 2011! Below is an overview of our stats for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 150,000 times in 2011. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 6 days for that many people to see it.
Click here to see the complete report.
Our new website is now active! Go check it out at www.lewan.com
Also as a reminder, follow us on the following social media sites:
Twitter: http://twitter.com/LewanCorp
FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/LewanandAssociates
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/lewan-&-associates
PLEASE NOTE EVENT DATE CHANGED TO January 19th
This whole cloud thing and positioning every IT consumable “…. as a service” has interesting implications for IT professionals and IT solution providers. I work for a solutions provider and we have to look at these new consumption models, understand the benefits and pitfalls of them, and put together a plan of how to address these models and leverage them ourselves. Now, I am not saying I think everything is ready or should be a service that’s consumed over the Internet or that building an “internal cloud” is critical to running an IT shop these days, but I do believe that ignoring that these models exist is only going to get you (and me) in trouble.
We have decided to embrace the concept and leverage it where it makes sense and test out the waters. In doing so we’ve come up with new support models where we’ve centralized some of our support functions and have leveraged some tools that make remote support more realistic and economical for customers. We’ve also built out a suite of services that we felt our customers may want to leverage to be more efficient with their IT spend and IT resources as you can’t hire an expert in every subject matter, so leave some of the “support stuff” up to us and focus on the more business specific functions that can make your company better. We’ll help keep the wheels on the bus, but we need you to drive it somewhere business relevant. The services we started with are:
All the services we built have some “cloud” element to them in that we are serving some aspect (if not the entire service) remotely. All of them use our Remote Operations Center (ROC) for centralized support, provisioning and monitoring and some of them are hosting applications and/or data off of the customers premise as well, e.g., Email, Data Protection, IaaS.
We are going to discuss some of the impacts of this new way of consuming IT services at an event we’re holding in Denver on January 19th at Mile High Station. It will be a great place to discuss with your peers what’s working and what’s not and enjoy some social time at the happy hour we’re hosting after the event to network a bit. Click here to sign up: http://www.lewan.com/events.
It was a great event in Colorado Springs at the CIMA conference. Lewan was a Diamond Sponsor and had the opportunity to present some information related to data classification, relating this information to the impacts of primary storage, data protection and archival tiers and how to squeeze more efficiency out of your storage platforms.
Thank you to everyone who braved the snow and attended the VMUG today. Special thanks to Cale Fogel from VMware for the all of the assistance demo’ing and discussing vSphere 5 today.
Standing room only at Lewan’s Synergy of the Rockies event!
Sent from my iPhone
If you are still using ESXi/ESX 3.5 and have not applied the appropriate patch listed below for your environment, we recommend that you install this patch:
· ESXi ESXe350-201012401-I-BG
· ESX ESX350-201012410-BG
This patch MUST be installed to continue patching hosts after June 1st. The patch updates the secure key.
You can find more information about the patch, and how to apply it, in these article:
· For ESXi, see 1030002.
· For ESX, see 1030001.
Chethan Kumar has recently updated the Performance Troubleshooting for vSphere 4.1 guide. This is a great asset I use regularly for any client or partner that asks about vSphere performance – especially those working with Tier 1 applications. It is very educational and addresses the most common scenarios clients experience.
Abstract:
“The hugely popular Performance Troubleshooting for VMware vSphere 4 guide is now updated for vSphere 4.1 . This document provides step-by-step approach for troubleshooting most common performance problems in vSphere-based virtual environments. The steps discussed in the document use performance data and charts readily available in the vSphere Client and esxtop to aid the troubleshooting flows. Each performance troubleshooting flow has two parts:
1. How to identify the problem using specific performance counters.
2. Possible causes of the problem and solutions to solve it.”
It is located here: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-14905
My MacBook Pro came with a 500GB 5400 rpm drive stock. I was looking at upgrading to a faster drive. I looked at traditional 7200 rpm drives as well as SSD drives, which are still quite expensive for $/GB.
So not wanting to drop like $450 for a relatively decent size SSD drive, NewEgg recently had a 500GB “Hybrid” drive on sale for $99 so I took the leap. It is a Seagate drive which is a 500GB 7200 rpm drive but it also has a 4GB SSD/Flash component. It then has the ability to “learn” what you use the most, which it moves that data to the SSD area. In theory, this should give you an awesome performance enhancement while still keeping the $/GB price down.
Initially just working with the new drive “seems” faster. Knowing I wanted to compare the results, I noted the time it took to do different things that are normally drive intensive. So here’s my test results for both drives:
| Cold Boot to Login | Login to Usable | Win 7 VM Power up to usable | |
| Old 5400rpm Stock Drive | 1m 19s | 1m 14s | 2m 15s |
| New Hybrid Drive | 1m 13s | 1m 5s (1st time)
43s (2nd time) |
1m 50s (1st time)
49s (2nd time) 42s (3rd time) |
Note – The data on the old drive and the new drive is exactly the same. I cloned the old drive onto the new drive. And overall, it’s getting snappier, it seems, as I continue using it. The above numbers also show that it’s “learning” as well. So for me, it’s been awesome and I’d definitely recommend taking a look at this drive if you’re in the same situation.
Here’s the links to the drive that I got. I did get mine for $99 so perhaps they’ll go back on sale sometime soon.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148591
http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=ST95005620AS&cid=13025157019588466692#p
Hope it’s helpful!