I recently attended the first Nashville Area Compellent User Group hosted at Thompson Machinery. It was a great meeting with Jeff Lamothe of Compellent presenting the upcoming features and enhancements to the Storage Center line. Thanks also to Greg Horsley and Whit Linder for putting this together and buying us the fish dinner!
I also was allowed to make a presentation (yeah me!) about Power-Shell scripting we recently did at my company to help manage our QA and development MS SQL Server environments with the Compellent StorageCenter array. The script is fairly simple, but works very well for us. It uses a configuration file to link Compellent volume names to mount paths. It uses the volume names to present a list of available replay dates to select. Once the replay is selected the magic happens!
- It stops the services listed in the file
- Unmounts and destroys the previous replay views
- Creates the new replay views and assigns the volume mappings
- And finally restarts the services
If all is configured correctly from start to finish you can refresh a sandbox system with a replay from a production system in less than 5 minutes. Our DBAs love this!
You can download the script and presentation I made here : Compellent PowerShell – Mount Replays
This is one of the coolest clocks I’ve seen in a while. Unfortunately you are not going to be able to go down to the local Best Buy or Radio Shack and buy this one. It is a DIY with some major involvement. If you are not into electro-etching then this may not be for you, but you can still enjoy the video! Original DIY article : http://sensi.org/~svo/strobeshnik/
I’m just starting reading a new raw Packt book called Building Enterprise Ready Telephony Systems with sipXecs 4.0. I’ve planned to deploy sipX in my company for some time now and we are about a month or two out from being in production. I’ll post back with a review soon.
I’ve used a bunch of vendors in my various roles, both as a consultant and a consumer. From these I’ve compiled a short list that I could recommend wholeheartedly. One of these vendors is Telephony Depot a distributor based in Philidelphia, PA specializing in VoIP equipment. These guys are excellent at customer service and expertise in their field and have the best prices I have found for their products, hands down. I’ve consulted with their pre-sales staff and have received excellent advice on products and even some technical support on issues I’ve experienced.
Telephony Depot is an offshoot of iFax, the corporation behind HylaFax the leading fax software for Linux/Unix operating systems. My company has used HylaFax for years, starting with the OpenSource community edition and moving to the commercially supported version using high end Brooktrout digital fax cards.
I enjoy working with quality companies with compentant people. I’ve experienced nothing but with both iFax and Telephony Depot.
