Blog Entries for Phil Robinson

The Big Cloud in the Sky

phil@itnow.net — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 07:00:00 +0100

When I first heard the term cloud computing, I thought it was just putting your server in a data center and accessing it from anywhere. This is a similar concept, and has its benefits. About a year ago we lost power in our office for about 3 hours. All of our servers were in-house, connected to a big UPS battery backup that lasted all of about 20 minutes [...]

Virtually Amazing

phil@itnow.net — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 07:00:00 +0100

A couple of years ago we decided to dive into the world of server virtualization. This is an amazing technology that allows us to run multiple operating systems on a single server. One server can act like many. Microsoft servers run better when their tasks are focused. Take a mail server for example. You wouldn’t want your mail server to also host your [...]

Holy terabytes Batman!

phil@itnow.net — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 05:00:00 +0100

If I’d asked anyone what a thousand gigabytes is called 10 years ago, they’d look at my like I was crazy. No one could even fathom that much storage.

A few months ago, Seagate announced the worlds largest desktop hard drive, 1.5 TB. That TB means terabytes, otherwise known as 1,500 gigabytes, 1,500,000 megabytes, 1,500,000,000 kilobytes, you get the idea. [...]

Passwords are a pain

phil@itnow.net — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 05:00:00 +0100

A few months back we had a client’s network compromised by a former employee, stealing information for a competitor. This network had a high end firewall, an encrypted wireless network, and security measures in place to prevent something like this from happening, yet it still happened.

It happened because people don [...]