Can businesses really rip out wires and go Wi-Fi only?

Thursday, November 18th, 2010

The photo above is of the Q&A panel at WorkTech 2010, an event sponsored by a range of firms sitting in a relatively undeveloped quarter of the IT business: the part that crosses over with facilities management.

This is the part of a company that does the more physical types of work to the more physical types of company asset, such as buildings, furniture, plumbing and wiring. WorkTech is a pretty highfalutin forum, put together by the Cordless Group, and with some high-powered heavy thinkers – Edward de Bono and various other pundits and commentators who have made it their business to both observe and suggest how we work, and how the spaces we are in affect the work we do.

The interchange which had me almost regurgitating my mocha came with the very first audience question. A rather self-effacing young lady took the microphone (first questions are always a bit of a tough one) to ask: “we are just setting up for our move to a new building and our IT consultants are telling us that we have to wire the entire building. Do we still need wires?”

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Microsoft Lync: sneak preview

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

Yesterday’s good internet weather slickened up the demos at Microsoft TechEd here in Berlin no end. It wasn’t possible to tell whether the screens we were watching in the keynote speech were being served from PCs behind the curtains, or on another continent.

However, the Demo Gods swiftly departed for a more pressing engagement: today’s demos of Microsoft Lync suffered enormously, from capricious Wi-Fi links, low external bandwidth and the product demonstrator’s “all on a laptop” lifestyle.

If it was me having to demonstrate a heavy piece of kit built three or four stacked products deep on top of Server 2008, I’d have a quad-core laptop and a pared-down server as a virtual machine, just in case; but pretty clearly, the Lync demo team were not aware of just how good their bad demo actually was.

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Hyper-V Cloud: Microsoft simplifies the private cloud

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

Microsoft has announced the availability of Hyper-V Cloud here at TechEd Europe in Berlin: a seven-part programme designed to speed up client companies constructing their own internal clouds.

Some of the seven parts of the programme are relatively simple and clearly understood – for example, Microsoft and a grab-bag of hardware vendors have agreed a reference platform suitable for the construction of a pool of physical machines and virtual hosts to make up a private cloud. Other parts are frankly mind-boggling, like the cashback scheme. If you move to Hyper-V cloud and make it work for you, whether you’ve virtualised already or not, then Microsoft has some money for you.

There’s always a bit of a “brain gap” when it comes to announcements about virtualisation – it takes a while for listeners to get their heads around the concepts and bat back a few apposite questions, and I think Microsoft caught the assembled press throng well and truly on the hop with the cashback offer. Yes, it does extend beyond domestic US clients. Whether it’s conditional on making use of the new hardware freshly published on the Hyper-V Cloud compatibility framework list is an intriguing question. It’s also a bit too early to figure out things like return on investment since, there are no customers using this newly announced toolkit yet.
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VSphere SMB Kit: the small print has the big numbers

Friday, October 15th, 2010

It’s a Friday and one of my clients has the hump with me. I had been extolling the virtues of the VMware VSphere SMB Kit – a licence pack that provides for up to three Virtual Server hosts, and up to 20 Virtual Machine Guests, all for a one-off price of $495 (approx £380). At that kind of price it’s a no-brainer – even if there are some restrictions, because you can only have a two-socket server with a maximum of six cores per socket to fit into the deal.

So off he trundled to his software licence vendor – an increasingly specialised niche these days, often but not always found as a sub-group within a traditional hardware reselling operation. They nodded through his verbal request for a quote, and carefully sent him something that puts together an overall quote which starts from the “Essentials plus bundle for three hosts”, at £1,529.41, then adds on four copies of VMware Standard for one processor (that’s £699 each), VCenter Server 4 Foundation for up to three hosts (another £618), another four instances of the year-long basic support/subscription (cheaper at £212 but there’s four so let’s say £848), and the same year-long support for VCenter (£245). In total, the entire quote tots up to £10,823.

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Citrix taps into the power of iOS 4.2 on the iPad

Friday, October 8th, 2010

Citrix CEO Mark Templeton couldn’t resist jumping the gun a little this week with a sneak peek at Citrix Receiver for iOS 4.2 on the iPad.

Even though Reciever is a one-client-fits-all front end for getting to Citrix’s remote computing product suite, there were still a few good reasons for punchlining his Keynote speech at Citrix Synergy in Berlin with a little demo of a complete Windows Server corporate desktop, made visible on an iPad. (A hint for any of you intending to pull off this kind of demo with an iPad – don’t point a HDTV camera at the device while you are logging in: the on-screen keyboard has letters quite large enough that you’ve just invited a room of 3,000 people to watch you type in your password.)

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The Open University and the black economy

Friday, October 1st, 2010

September 18th was the final delivery deadline for a variety of course dissertations at the Open University. How do I know this, you ask? Old Cassidy must be well past the time when he thinks anyone’s got anything to teach him, surely?

I know it because in the preceding ten days I somehow got the mark of Cain when it came to friends and acquaintances with dying laptops. They all had to be fixed in time for the traditional all-night panic-fuelled scribble-fest on the 17th, and no, I could not take the machine away. The note of panic in the various emails, tweets, texts and wheedling phone calls was nothing short of a full-blown emotional assault. Castle Wolfenstein is, by comparison, a warm-up.

I suspect that most PC Pro readers and contributors are wily enough to steer clear of this kind of situation. There comes a point when there is no longer any shame in simply playing dumb when asked to repair a computer, or terrifying the hormonal supplicant by threatening to “fix” their laptop with a copy of Knoppix.

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How storm clouds melted a network

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

As is becoming traditional around Bank Holidays, this is a blog sparked by a current article on the BBC website, this time about harnessing electricity from humid air.

The BBC is sceptical about the claims made by the academic, though to be fair it seems more focussed on his small-scale examples, than on the basic observation that there’s electricity in the atmosphere. My personal and network-related encounter with this phenomenon was tantalising – not because there was St Elmo’s Fire dancing about the patch panels or anything like that, but because the onset of the credit crunch sank what could have been a very nice little project.

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How many emails does it take to order a line from BT?

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

I hate it when people tease out a punchline, so I’ll tell you: it’s 122.

One hundred and twenty two emails, to get an order progressed with our national telecoms carrier. It almost beggars belief – but, for those of us who view telecoms connectivity as part of the very first stages of our WAN rollouts, it’s rapidly becoming the longest, most painful and least controllable part of any project. The reason, in this case, is because the order was placed with a BT Local Business (BTLB) unit.

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Why you might need to reboot your router to see a website

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

Just at holiday season begins, it looks very much as if various service providers and backbone connection suppliers have been very busy.

Lots of services have had their public IP addresses updated; I am getting calls from clients whose internal systems don’t genuinely use a domain name to get to a service. It’s not uncommon for all manner of software products (including router firmware) to let you type in www.pcpro.co.uk, and then look it up at that moment and convert it to 212.100.242.151 – which is what they then store for future connection attempts.

When we decide to change that underlying server address – which isn’t a bad thing to do, it’s a supported and allegedly seamless choice for a connectivity person to make – these various bits of software and hardware that use “one-shot lookup” simply fail to re-connect the PCs behind them.

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Why small businesses should care about VMware vSphere 4.1

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

Today, VMware has released the next version of its hypervisor: vSphere 4.1 is an incremental update to its low-level dedicated virtual host, with roots in the Linux codebase buried deep under man-centuries of coding effort by VMware’s virtualisation gurus. So what is it, and why should you care? (more…)