Switch Systems Blog

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
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• 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!)

We’ve been beavering away on the website with a brand new look & feel, plus new content including our twitter feed and software section. Let us know what you think!

We’ll be adding even more customer testimonials, software development information and other pages as we get round to them.

(continue reading…)

We rigged up a webcam with some timelapse functionality to generate this video – showing the set-up and tear down of the sundown 2010 event.

Here we have Ben, Kris, Rauiri (and another dude Dan Barber) setting up the network at this year’s Sundown 2010. Wonder where Hannah is…

 

Well the summer appears to have been and gone, but in that time we’ve been very busy!

• We welcome our newest staff member Hannah, who joins us for her year-in-industry placement to provide additional tech support and to help us with our refurbishment project.

• We completed a medium sized SBS 2008 installation at a local Exeter school, providing web filtering, group policy work and remote access.

• Our software development work with Exeter University continues, with the university wide release of an improved system for managing their staff recruitment process.

• We’ve taken in some more end-of-life kit from an Exeter school, which we will be refurbishing and releasing to charity

We’ll be changing the format of the blog shortly, and do a general revamp of all our websites, so watch this space!

In other news

The Small Business Server ‘Aurora’ beta has been released, which we’re evaluating right now. It incorporates features from Windows Home Server (such as drive extending, client workstation backups etc), whilst maintaining the SBS featureset. It’s also the first product to include cloud technology features, though those remain to be detailed (but likely to be some sort of remote file storage system)

We’ve been talking about it for a while, but it’s finally here – the new Switch Systems Blog!