Virtualization Begins

For about the past nine months I’ve been working on growing the use of virtualiztion within my firm. We had dabbled with virtualizing a couple of misc. application/development servers with the first release of VMWare Server, but I knew that in order to consolidate the rest of environment, as well as better prepare us for [...]

The Meaning of Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)

One of my guys emailed me this, I wish I knew where it came for so I could give credit. This goes a long way towards explaining why we’ve seen so many problems with supposedly good hardware.
You’ve probably seen hardware manufacturers talk about the Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) for their equipment. For example, disk [...]

Monitoring Dell Hardware with Nagios

We use the excellent Nagios network, host and service monitoring software at the office to track the status of our servers, routers, and network devices and connections. The program works great and we love it. However, the one area that we have wanted to track was the status of Dell PowerEdge servers, particularly those running [...]