Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

I'm heading out to New York next week. I'll be speaking on two panels now, both on Thursday. Shopping Search Tactics and the Retailer Forum. Should be a fun time, and I'm looking forward to catching up with some friends. I'm also anticipating having some business deals worked out while I'm there, making for some interesting weeks when I return. :) I guess I'll see how it goes, but boy do I enjoy SES.

For anyone working in the IT industry, you know how frustrating it is to have to try to find the other end of a cable. Regardless if it's phone or network, it could be a very long cable that is wrapped throughout the building. Well, some time ago we bought a tone generator and probe. We bought it elsewhere at the time because we didn't carry them at all. But we now have several models to choose from. The one we bought was the Greenlee Classic Tone and Probe Kit . On the one end, it allows you to plug in to either a jack or use a coupler to attach to a cable. The other device goes to the other end so you can figure out which wire you've plugged in to. I luckily don't have to do all that much with wiring, but there have been enough times, even at home, where I can't figure out what the wire is that I'm trying to use that I consider this an essential tool. Without it, one could easily spend hours trying to find that one elusive cable - and I've done that. How m...

Part of moving into a new location is rewiring the building. We ran Cat-6 throughout, but ended up using Cat-5 between the patch panels and switches. Now, we get the fun job (yes, that's sarcastic) of adding in wire management. They were already in place between each of the patch panels, so that's all pretty. But the bottom portion is what our phone system installers did, and the mid section is all of our switches. I suppose it could be worse. It could have been worse, though. We could be staring at a wiring closet like in our last building. Yes, we've got data lines. Way too many of them... and the warehouse has their own patch panels with one cable between.

An essential part of any balanced breakfast... ok, so these ain't no Lucky Charms. We ordered load balancers from Kemp Technologies (no, not hemp... I said Kemp) yesterday and they've already shipped. Load balancers are an essential part of any highly available website infrastructure, allowing for multiple servers to handle the requests based upon rules set up ahead of time. Example #1: Server down The first example of when someone needs a load balancer is when a server crashes. For some websites, this means they're gone. For a load balanced website, this means that the traffic starts hitting the other server(s) and the users have no idea that something happened. Example #2: Server slow Sometimes, a processes goes in an unplanned direction and uses a ton of resources. This presents a more difficult problem - the server responds as if it is up, but it just doesn't perform well. That means that the load balancer needs to watch what's going on (response times) and not ...

We're trying to upgrade to a load balanced, fully redundant web serving platform now. What we currently have was a $3000 server about 30 months ago, so it's time to look at upgrades. I don't usually like Dell, but their prices are something else. As we're getting ready to upgrade our servers, I happened across Dell's website and checked what they had for a deal at the moment. We ended up getting a few at stupid prices - stupid meaning very low for what we're getting. Base Model The base model on these machines is a 1U rackmount 2.8GHz/2MB Cache Xeon with 1GB RAM, 2 x GB ethernet ports and an 80GB HDD. Nothing too impressive. Free Upgrade To start making it seem a little nicer, they offered a FREE second processor. Customization We added in 7GB more RAM, another drive (mirroring is a good thing) and a few other odds and ends including the 3 year service plan. Since it's Dell, we'll probably need that. ;-) Price Reduction Since it was over $2700, Dell took...

Yesterday, as we were meeting with our local Sun VAR, he mentioned that some data pipes had been run into their area. He wasn't talking the normal data pipes that we hear about every day. No, not just a T-1. Not a DS-3. Not an OC-3 at 155Mbps. No, he was talking INSANE bandwidth. Definition of Insane My usual definition of insane is doing the same action over and over expecting different results. But that doesn't apply here. Perhaps X-Treme would fit better. This is like the X-Games of bandwidth. He was talking about OC-192's, which are 10Gbps each. But he wasn't talking about 1. Nor was he talking about 2. He was talking about 50. Yes, that makes 500Gbps. What could possibly require that type of bandwidth? Better yet, how can I attach a server at the end of those cable runs? Just how big is this? I'll leave you with a visualization of just how big of a data pipe I feel this is. I doubt it actually occupies all that much space physically, but in our virtual world si...