Switch Systems Blog

Youtube have an awesome series of infographics based on the fact that “every second, one hour of video is uploaded to youtube”.

See for yourself at www.onehourpersecond.com

ArsTechnica Reports on a High Court filing in the UK by Microsoft that Comet created and sold “more than 94,000 sets of counterfeit Windows Vista and Windows XP recovery CDs” source: Microsoft News Centre.

The recovery discs were being sold to customers for £14.99 when customers already have a recovery partition on their computer with the ability to create rescue media.

Comet have responded stating that they were acting in the interest of the customer, due to the policy change that OEM Microsoft operating system installs would not ship with recovery discs.

Congratulations to all who were shortlisted for last nights inaugural Exeter Impact awards held by the University of Exeter. An enjoyable evening with good company, good food, and even a few laughs!

Thank you to all of the RKT team for all their hard work in putting the event together.

Our opening hours over christmas and new years will be:

• Friday 23rd December
  09:00 – 13:00 (Half Day)
• Saturday 24th December
  Closed
• Sunday 25th December
  Closed
• Monday 26th December
  Closed
• Tuesday 27th December to Friday 30th December
  09:00 – 13:00 (Half Day)
• Saturday 31st December
  Closed
• Sunday 1st January
  Closed
• Monday 2nd January
  Closed
• Tuesday 3rd January
  Open as usual

As usual, our out-of-hours emergency contact number will be available 24/7, and we will be regularly checking phones and email so please leave a message if you need to contact us over the festive period.

Stay tuned for our exciting new newsletter, which should be arriving soon!

So last friday’s datacentre upgrade went well I thought, no cuts or bruises, no data loss… plus I got to the data centre in 4 hours which is pretty good going from down here in the south west!

After signing in, I walked up to the cage where our servers sit. I took a couple of sneaky pictures – i wasn’t sure whether I was allowed to take pictures or not inside the ‘secure area’!

Above: yes people, this is what the internet looks like! Dry air-conditioned floors with raised floors, cable raceways, secure cages and flashing lights.

So the plan was to take out our old 4U VMware server and replace it with two newer, smaller (1U), and much more powerful machines. Then I remembered this server was racked at the top of the cabinet, making it’s removal a very carefully executed operation!

Above: that’s quite high. and that server is v. heavy!

In goes our new gear:

Job done!

Many thanks to the entire Switch Systems team for all their planning and preparation work, making this complete hardware change an operation which only resulted in 90 minutes of downtime (not that I think anyone noticed, as our existing contingency measures meant everything kept running anyway!)

From “The Register“, Western Digital are sending in divers to help recover some of their flooded HD manufacturing gear. Analysts estimate that 48 million less drives will be shipped in the last quarter of this year because of the devastating flooding.

Microsoft have done another ‘vision’ video, this is thier 2011 future vision of office productivity. Nice.

The new November Microsoft Dynamics CRM update brings facebook and twitter style social feeds (activity streams, walls, etc) to CRM, better windows phone 7 support, tighter integration and more.. There’s also the promise of Firefox/Chrome/Safari support in the first half of 2012 (yippee!). Check out the video posted.

Recently released was “Mouse without Borders“, a Synergy like program which lets you share one keyboard/mouse/monitor across multiple computers. The killer feature of MouseWithoutBorders is that you can copy&paste, drag&drop files (!), and lock/logon multiple workstations simultaniously. Unfortunately it only supports up to 4 devices, but it’s definately worth trying out.