Meeting Re-caps for 2005

December 2005 - iSCSI SANs
Presented by EqualLogic 

There's been a lot of discussion around the future of disk technology lately, especially around the areas of 'right-sizing', expandability, flexibility and of course, performance.  There's another whole set of discussions being held about performance.  Recently Apple released their XSan product - still too new to tell if it will be a good long term solution. 

All the buzz really comes down to two things:  1) SATA drives and their use as enterprise-level storage technology.  Is the slower rotational speed really going to effect overall performance?  Will the lower MTBF ratings result in lost data? And 2) is iScsi technology's flexibility going to outweigh its limitations regarding throughput?

Having recently looked at disk products from Sun/Storagetek, Nexsan, Apple, Dell/EMC, HP and others, I thought this would be a great time to get some hands-on time with some disk technology. Come see what iScsi can do for you and where it's a good fit for your organization.

Food for thought: Will the multiple data-paths required by iScsi cause a burden on an average Ethernet network?  Should you multihome the servers attached to your iScsi box in order to segment the traffic from the clients to the servers away from the servers to the storage?  Is iScsi really ready for prime-time?  Is SATA ready for enterprise-class storage?  Is the use of iScsi going to necessitate the use of TOE cards?  If so, is the flexibility of iScsi enough to trump the use of an FC infrastructure?  How good (read: reliable) is the Microsoft iScsi initiator?

Door prizes provided by Microsoft New England and Culminis

November 2005 Meeting Recap

The November meeting was held Wednesday Nov 9th at the Holo-Dek office in Hampton.
November's topic: "Managing pc's in a public environment"

We heard from Paul Sheehy, IT Managerfor the Holo-Dek,  a next-generation cyber-cafe with top-of-the line pc's mixed in with a casual atmosphere to eat, drink, and frag your buddies.

Paul and his team have compiled a good batch of knowledge about the unique IT challenges they've overcome in order to effectively manage the pc's which are publicly accessible. There's more to it than renting a pc and playing a game.

We discussed several interesting topics such as:
- 140 GB Ghost images: how to maintain and deploy them
- Per-user preferences and roaming profiles
- License management for software with no volume-licensing scheme
- Centralizing CD access and virtualizing the hardware
- Security considerations

8 Merrill Industrial Parkway, off Towle Farm Road, Hampton
Phone: 603.758.1010
www.holo-dek.com

Also at this meeting we  discussed possible  upcoming changes to the format of Sea-Tug meetings. If you have any interest in shaping the future of the group, please plan on attending or contacting us at caretaker@sea-tug.com

September '05 Meeting re-cap

A rousing preview of Windows Vista.  PPT is available here.

July '05 Meeting re-cap

    Scriptlogic http://www.scriptlogic.com/ presented real world solutions to real world problems with their toolset

The following is from Mike Miller, the Field Sales Manager for the New England region:

I wanted to thank you once again for inviting us to your SEA-TUG meeting this week. It was a pleasure having an opportunity to speak with your group on how ScriptLogic tools are helping companies just like theirs to solve real word IT issues. Because we have so many products today I’ll bet there was some confusion on what products do what, so I’ve put together the overview of all products below. Please tell all those who attended that I am available to answer any questions or get them a demo of any of our products.

We have several award winning applications designed to address different pain points felt by all IT professionals.  Here is a listing of our suite of applications with links to information on each, as well as a link below for recorded demos of each.

ScriptLogic Products and the Pains They Resolve:

• Desktop Authority
  • Standardize, configure, map printers, install apps/patches, Outlook profiles, security
  • Remote management and Remote Control
  • Subscription options for automating Patch Management as well as  Spyware Detection and Removal!
  • Augment the capabilities of SMS 2003 Read the white paper
• Active Administrator
  • Permissions, Group Policies
  • Auditing
  • Reports and Alerts
• Enterprise Security Reporter
  • Secure, Robust out-of-the-box Reports
  • Custom report builders
  • Simple Discovery Process
  • Enterprise Scopes
• Security Explorer
  • Security Management
  • HIPAA & SOX Compliance Reporting Requirements Read the white paper
  • Compliance, Documentation
• Secure Copy
  • Data Migration & SAN/NAS Server Consolidation
    Migrates NTFS permissions, file shares,  local users and groups, and compression settings
    Overcome file ownership problems and automatically retry unavailable files

• Service Explorer
  • Machine Level Service Management for Scheduled Maintenance
  • Centralized Management of Services and Tasks
  • View All Accounts on Selected Services
• Cloak
  •  Users will only see the files and/or folders that they have permission to access
  • “Out of sight – out of mind” filtering
  • Eliminates ‘False Positives’ when File System Auditing is enabled

• Patch Authority Plus
  • Automate Updates of the Latest Patches on Desktops and Servers
  • Selection, Distribution, Deployment, and Reporting Capabilities
  • Enhanced Security with Central Management of Service Status, Configuration, Logon Settings and Task Configuration

June '05 Meeting re-cap

Wednesday, June 8, 2005 at 6:00 pm
Topic: Microsoft ISA 2K4
Internet Security (firewall) and Acceleration (proxy) Server from Microsoft is just one of the many options available for protecting your network from the Internet.

A *lot* has changed since the early versions. You might want to take a look at http://www.microsoft.com/isaserver

Scott Pratt from Newbury Partners will be presenting an interactive demo of ISA 2K4 and holding a discussion of security best practices. 

Click here for tonight's PPT file.

For those of you keeping track, the Scriptlogic presentation has been postponed until next month. We also have FoundryNet on tap to do a demo of their sFlow technology. 

Cambridge Computer also held a seminar at the Wentworth reviewing backup bottlenecks and strategies.  If anyone's interested in discussing backup issues, give these guys a call, or let us know and we can schedule them to come up for a presentation.
        http://www.cambridgecomputer.com/free_lectures.cfm

May 2005 Meeting Re-Cap

Remote Access Tools

A demo of Venti Solutions was displayed and a discussion of pricing and competition ensued.


Highlights:
http://www.ventisolutions.com - A web based remote support tool like Webex at fraction of the cost.
How is this different than using pcAnywhere or VNC? Basically this is a no-installation required solution. No ports need to be opened in the firewall, users don't need to know their IP Address, no software has to be installed on the client pc ahead of time. A user can call you and you can be live on their pc in less than 5 minutes.

OK, how is this different than Webex? Primarily cost, but the toolset is from a different vendor. Venti leverages Intel LANDesk technology.

Well what's the cost? They offer a couple plans...
1) $199 per month for a customized portal with unlimited use and extra tools (file xfer, chat, remote inventory, etc).
2) $99 per month unlimited use but on a shared portal.
3) $50 per month for 5 uses, and $15 per use after 5.

Some other options were raised with various costs:
B-Live, Mywebex, Gotomypc, ePop and webhuddle were all discussed.
We also talked about SBS2005 and it's built-in portal features which we'll discuss at a future meeting.

Following the demo we had a general Q&A session.

From some fun reading, head on over to Apparent Networks and read this article on jumbo packet sizes and Gb networks.

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Last modified: 11/20/06