My experience and feedback from the tech team is that best practice is often easier to implement at clients rather than internally. We have always thought we were reasonably good at keeping our systems at a reasonable level, and certainly from a hardware perspective with both Cisco and IBM equipment it looks pretty good. However we did get application sprawl especially with all the growth we have experienced and my willingness to try new applications.
This month with the move to some new internal management systems, we have managed to turn off a whole lot of legacy systems, thus reducing the number of servers and systems. We also took the time to rebuild all the internal systems including new Active Directory, File and Print, Exchange, SQL and Terminal servers – great to start afresh!
Our Windows Server environment is now almost completely 2008 Server (all x64 and a mix of R2 and R1). We have one remaining 2003 Server, which will be soon moved to 2008.
Many people forget that Vodafone do residential homes and broadband connections. I thought about changing, procrastinated, but then saw the savings. For me at home, it was over 20% reduction in spend. Now Vodafone have added even more value into some of the packages with the ability to add a Vodafone or national number to your account and talk free for up to an hour.
For those of you hanging out for the iphone 4, you can pre-register at: http://www.vodafone.co.nz/iphone/
A number of us have either been travelling or are about to travel. Greig has just got back from a virtualisation conference in Chicago, and I’m back to Boston in September. Some sites that we find are great for making all those travel arrangements easier:
Best Airline in the world: www.airnewzealand.com
Great site if you want to travel on the star alliance network and need to find connecting flights on other airlines: www.staralliance.com
Minimizing time spent in the airport, with faster connections: www.expedia.co.nz
Minimizing time spent at border entry: www.immigration.govt.nz/apec/