sammy

HP warranty support, nicer interface , more robust and reliable over the years is will be in service , but, and the big but is that the cost difference often means you can just keep a couple of spares in the cupboard for swapouts when needed. One other feature , and a slightly selfish one is that being comfortable with the HP interface will put your cv in good stead for a possible move to corporates in the future, if that was ever part of your plan.

How many of you guys been out on the roads in the last few weeks of snowy weather....if you have your braver then me.....i finally managed to pull the old warhorse out of the shed last week....hopefully there wont be any more snow.

This stinks of a DNS issue to me, perhaps some issue with the Round robin configuration or an incorrect record in the DNS which is preventing clients from querying the other DNS servers in the event of a failure. I know round robin is on by default, so theoreticaly the other 2 servers with the GC should point clients to the correct DNS server and provide logon authentication....so in my mind the only reason this wouldnt work is if GC was not pointing clients to the other DNS servers.

Hi there, was DNS only running on 1 server ? Sam

Hey Steve....Yamaha Virago XV1100 eh....love those cruiser style bikes myself....absolutley love em....just wish we had better weather here in the UK for them...... Sam

Looks like the bikers are finally coming in.... I have managed to avoid the injuries so far...but then i suppose its probably becuase i have managed to avoid really pushing the bike to where it needs to be...anyone done any track days or can recommend any courses specifically for learning get knees down?

Jaffa Cakes....mmmm.....right now i would love to eat my way out of a mountain of jaffa cakes.

LG used to do a screen which was much more reasonable then £40k, just trying to dig up the info....be back shortly.

touché , thats exactly what i did, i knocked on doors, i cold called poeple, i did everything possible to get in front of poeple. In this day and age sending a electronic CV just isnt enough. Either you can leave your future in the hands of some greedy little recruitment agent who is equally happy when you get a job and even happier when you lose it so that he can replace you elsewhere.... or you take your future in your own hands and go knocking. thats my opionion anyway have a good day and happy hunting.

Hi James, any issues post em up and we can all have a dig at em....there is enough technical guys on here to start up a school for techies.... If it doesnt get resolved on this forum, it doesnt get resolved.

hmmmm Stone buying out Viglan.....interesting. I was down there a few months ago and they were pulling in orders for servers and racking like it was going out of fashion with some very large prestigious clients.....interesting to see that they are closing up now....wonder if Stone will maintain the "brand" if you can call it that. Still.....good riddance i suppose, i have always preferred HP /IBM /DELL .... even though I have been required to facilitate some third party stuff over the years....never did like it. 2009 is going to be fun fun fun. :D:D:D:D:D

agreed...i cant distinguish between them...they all seem to have the same problems....in fact i think i should catalogue there excuses and the true meanings.... eg. Operator - Sorry sir your parcel was dispatched to the wrong depot, it will be back here today and shipped out tonight and to you first thing tomorow morning. What he meant - Sorry pal, we left your parcel lying here, and the driver cant be bothered to come back and get it, so it will go out on the next delivery. Operator - Sorry sir we cant actually find your parcel in our system, when did you ship it? What he meant - Sorry pal, we havnt picked it up from the company shipping it to you, hence theres no chance your getting it in the next 2 days, you twat..

third party chargers are fine, the only difference is branding...you ultimately pay for that. been selling the third party ones for years without any issue, just make sure they are UK sourced and that way you can return with issues if need be.

Hey guys, its pretty standard procedure for them to ask for the drive back as part of the warranty procedure. All being said and done the drive will go back, realistically they will format it first, then check for disks errors on some bit of generic software and if all is ok resell it as a returned and non-faulty drive. If it ever lands in any new clients server, either it will replace a drive in an array and therefore be immediately written too, or someone will install a OS on it to start a new build...either way you data is never accessible. Also with it being 1 drive in the array, it has some parity info on it which contains pointers to bits of data in the array, nothing usuable in that state anyway. I wouldnt worry at all, the HP "machine" is such a huge operation, im tempted to tell you that there is almost no human intervention in the initial receipt and formatting stage. By the way Happy New Year Guys and Gals.

Hitachi have always been excellent storage systems...didnt know this one had been released at this price point until now. I think i need to start paying more attention to Hitachi. The HP MSA2000 in any of its several flavours is great...i have customers out there using all versions and having no issues. I hope any of you guys that do have issues with the units are relying on the reseller you purchased it from to push through any issues you have directly to HP. Its the resellers responsibility to take care of you.

Normally the way to do it is to connect the autoloader to one server using either a SAS/SCSI or Fiber connection. Then use remote agents (on SYmanctec Backup Exec ) on all the other servers to backup across the network. To negate any possible implications of network congestion you can install a cheap additional Gigabit NIC into each of the 8 servers and dedicate all the backup traffic across that NIC, therefore allowing you to backup during the daytime if need be. That has proven to be a fast and reliable method for a few of my clients.

sorry im not sure what your issue is, are you backing up 8 servers over the LAN to 1 device, or are you thinking of using a Fiber based tape autoloader device which would mean having a fiber card in each server and then fiber switch ? can you please clarify ?

Hi, if your looking at the autoloader route, then you should take a peek at these, HP MSL2024 1 LTO-4 Ultr 1760 SAS Library, native they will backup 19.2Tb using upto 24 LTO tapes in the autoloader, giving you about 288Gb Per hour native or 576Gb per hour compressed. I have a few clients with these devices and they are reliable and very good. The Tandberg is also a very good device, and i have some clients who have chosen to go that route, my only quibble or word of advice there normally is that the warranty centres for tandberg are in Europe which means that under a warranty recall scenario you have to wait for tape drives to be shipped back and forth, not the following day response you get with HP. I only advise this becuase in the past i have been in that warranty scenario...

I do like that idea David, simple and cheap, and exactly what i used to do for taking complete copies of server RAID sets.....I like. looks like the techies are awake and working well into the night

I agree this seems the best way, if your a HP shop then use something like a HP D2D100 Backup System , and you can choose a model which includes the appropriate sized LTO tape drive so that you can have the best of both worlds. The TeraLyte looks good, but your relying on carrying around cheaper SATA disks which are not really designed to be mobile devices. Also, you are putting your backups on a device which is not HP, and although this is not a problem in terms of branding, it may be if your not sure of the warranty "reliability" of the Teralyte. Personally i would stick with a tried and tested HP LTO solution for the offsite backups.

Very true....but i also deal with VMWARE, and Citrix so it makes no odds to me. Im basing it purely on same functionality, almost same interface and a third of the cost. to be quite honest, the vmware is excellent and we as a company sell alot of it and the Citrix....but for the purpose of this post which is a testing environment requirement, the branding is almost irrelevent. The free versions of both are excellent. These days however it all seems to come down to price.

hey Guys, vmware is good but personally i would go for a small HP ML310 or ML115 , put 4-6gb in there, 2 x sata 160gbs, 2 dual port nics, and install Virtual Iron virtualisation software on it. I got this running at home, hosting 2 x windows 2003 server, 1 x windows 2008 server and 2 x XP Pro desktops....all for testing purposes. Sammy

Hi mark, yes it is all possible from the bios or more accurately the RAID controller utility which resides on the RAID controller. You can also use the DELL software cd which will give you a more GUI version of the same information. I prefer using the RAID controller utility becuase its quicker, and simpler. Have a great day.... hopefully not spending much more time on RAID....i mean its supposed to be the festive season.. Sam

Guys, let me settle this, I have been selling all of the above for years.....and from experience...The IBM thinkpads are the toughest out there short of the Panasonic Toughbooks...the IBM's are also favoured by the "real" techies across the IT world...and i mean globally. The HP are excellent value and have the best warranties of possibly all the manufacturers out there...and i say this having worked as a technical guy years ago, selling them....calling support lines for clients...loggin calls etc... The DELL's.....well there cheap. All the above said and done i possibly fall into the Hp camp due to warranties and overall reliability, but the Lenovos are nice and seem to be really building a new client base now, something that was diminishing for years with the IBM's hence IBM selling off the entire PSG side of the business. Sammy

Hi Mark, you definitely can setup RAID with 2 arrays (2 mirrors) and a hot spare for both arrays on the internal controller. You need to assign the disks to separate arrays on the config screen, and then you will have the option of assigning a online spare to different arrays, as long as you leave that 5th disk out of the previous 2 arrays. I think possibly you are getting muddled with the terminolgy which is easy because it can be confusing. You need to set up 2 hardware level arrays, array A which will have the first 2 physical disks, then create the logical disk space on that array which will maximum be the size of 1 disk in that array if you assign that array as RAID 1 mirror. Then do the same for the second array, and create the logical drive , same as before. Then assign the spare to each array. If your wondering why there is a second raid controller in there, that is possibly becuase the server had an external storage box or DAS box attached which was being controlled and sliced up using that external card. Hope i have not confused you. sam