IT Partners is an early adopter of new technology because we want our customers to enjoy its benefits ahead of their competitors. Unfortunately this technology often has glitches for which we are forced to develop work-around solutions. Fortunately Apple is more on the ball than most vendors and their latest iPhone update will save us a lot of time and trouble.
There were a few small teething problems with the world’s favourite mobile phone but Release 2.2 of its firmware seems to have addressed all outstanding concerns. We are especially impressed with its integration with Microsoft Exchange through using Active Sync. If you’ve been holding off until the dust settled – now is the time to act.
Bullet Proof Server Infrastructure
Yesterday we completed a major milestone for IT Partners with the creation of a fully redundant, multipath IP SAN. For the lay person, that means we’ve created a resilient system for accessing data using IP (Internet Protocol). The work we have done internally, will be implemented at many client sites and will help many of our clients with lower costs and/or increase in system availability.
We used Cisco and IBM hardware and our virtualisation platform of choice was Citrix Xen Server. Senior Systems Engineer Greig McGill had to push the envelope to find a solution and in the process became an absolute guru on the IBM Blade Centre S, IBM DS3300 and Citrix Xen Server. Again, these are skills that will be invaluable to our clients.
Full credit to Citrix for quickly implementing changes to their documentation on multipathing within XenServer 5.0 and to the great support provided by Rob Marshall of IBM NZ.