News

Paul Reed who works as a consultant in a pre-sales technical role at ISN Solutions, has just passed his Xendesktop CCA. The exam is new, as is virtual desktop technology so this puts ISN ahead of our competitors in London’s IT support and consultancy market.

Here’s Paul’s take on the how studying for the CCA helped him:

“I recently studied for and passed the Citrix Certified Administrator (CCA) exam for Citrix XenDesktop 4.0.

“I have been testing various scenarios with XenDesktop in ISN’s internal Proof of Concept environment, however my studies for the CCA qualification taught me a lot more about the capabilities of the software. I read the “Citrix XenDesktop Administrators Guide” literally from cover to cover and used all the other online and printed material I could find to learn about all of the deployment methods and configuration scenarios that XenDesktop supports.

“Indeed, during my studies I tuned the configuration of our test environment to make it better suited to our own requirements. As our clients’ requirements vary greatly depending on number of users, bandwidth, applications and performance benchmarks, this sort of thorough study combined with practical experience of the product in production will be extremely beneficial when proposing a tailored implementation.

“The main benefit I found from taking the exam was understanding the emphasis Citrix place on each component of the product and how each integrate with each other. The exam also included a substantial number of questions about troubleshooting XenDesktop, which will be invaluable when supporting our XenDesktop implementations.”

If you need to know about whether virtual desktop is right for your business please call us on 020 7313 8300 for a chat about what’s possible

Tom Clowes, ISN’s service delivery supervisor, recently gained the ITIL v3 Foundation Qualification.

ISN are firm believers in #ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) as a structure for delivering and managing IT services. It has been developed as a framework, originally by the UK Government, covering all aspects of providing IT infrastructure services reliably, effectively and efficiently.

We are far from being slaves to the ITIL rule book however; customer satisfaction is always the compass we use for providing services. There is no point reinventing the wheel however and we are always keen to learn from best practice that has been shown to work in many countries and many industry sectors.

Tom brings the number of ISN staff with ITIL qualifications to five.

Now that Internet connections are faster, cheaper and more reliable, offering services across the net can be a reality.

This year I have sat through too many presentations on the topic of Cloud Computing. These are usually at vendor events where they explain how their products are the key to unlocking the benefits of Cloud Computing.

Along with Virtualisation, the “Cloud” has been one the favourite buzzwords of sales and marketing people across the land. These dull slideshows usually begin with “What is Cloud Computing? If you ask 10 people you’ll get 10 different answers” Yawn. Next they give the example of SalesForce.com as a leader in the field. As if we didn’t know. (The BBC have been offfering “cloud” services for decades: you don’t have to have a band in your living room to listen to some music, like you used to in the olden days).

#CloudForce

The truth is that most people in business and the IT industry have a crystal clear understanding of what Cloud services offer. This was apparent from the packed audience of at least a thousand eager attendees at SalesForce’s CloudForce event yesterday at the Novotel in Hammersmith.

#SalesForce’s charismatic CEO Marc Benioff gave a compelling and very polished keynote presentation of how their products are changing how companies can get better applications to their staff far more quickly and far more affordably.

Quick effective ERP over the web

Benioff drew in senior staff from companies such as BMC Software, Vetrazzo and the Daily Telegraph. For example Vetrazzo started up 4 years ago and turn recycled glass into kitchen worktops: they developed a whole business process management system in a few months using custom tools from SalesForce. The result is that they have something which is available to all their locations via the web and can be modified really easily to suit changing or new requirements.

#ITIL Helpdesk Example

BMC Software, vendors of helpdesk application Remedy, explained how they developed a fully functional ITIL conformant helpdesk system within 4 weeks. ISN are committed to using the ITIL framework throughout our company to deliver better service to our customers. So we were very interested to hear about this in particular.

#Cloud computing business tools

ISN have been using SalesForce.com for a few years now and find it a great improvement over other CRM systems we tried. We will be looking very closely at using SalesForce’s newest tools to develop new systems that support our own business and for opportunities where cloud services from #SalesForce and other organisations can help our clients businesses too.

ISN service desk analyst, Serhiy Krokhmal, gained his Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP) - Enterprise Adminstrator accreditation over the weekend.

The MCITP: Enterprise Administrator credential has become the leading qualification for Windows Server engineers, providing the most widely recognised validation of an engineer’s ability to support and design systems based on Microsoft desktop and server operating systems.

When I asked Serhiy how he found the training he said “It has certainly given me a broader appreciation of the features of Windows 2008 than I had before, even though I have been working with Windows 2003 and 2008 on a daily basis at ISN for some time. I would recommend anyone to follow the MCITP.”

Serhiy, who originates from the Ukraine, will be putting his skills to use for ISN’s oil and gas IT support clients.

ISN systems engineer Ben Gould today completed the last of the tests required to become a Microsoft Certified IT Professional.

The MCITP is the leading Microsoft Certification which provides widely recognised, objective validation of Ben’s ability to plan and execute modern projects involving cutting-edge technology such as Hyper-V and iSCSI using Microsoft Server Technologies.

Most organisations cant get by without professional IT consultancy to get value out of their IT systems. London IT support and IT consultancy specialists, ISN Solutions, have a policy of keeping all our systems engineers up to date with the main hardware and software that our clients use, so that we can offer them the best advice and support.

If your business needs a Microsoft Gold Partner to assist with any infrastructure, ISN have the people with the right skills to help. Call us on 020 7313 9900 to find out more.

ISN client, Premier Oil, began oil production in the Shelley field at 9am on Thursday 6th August. This is the first fruits following Premier’s takeover of Oilexco NOrth Sea assets earlier this year. The announcement of a second well is expected imminently.

ISN have been pleased to assist Premier Oil with the IT and telecomms work involved in merging the Oilexco infrastructure.

Find out more about ISN’s work providing IT and telecomms consultancy to the oil and gas sector.

London based IT consultancy ISN Solutions are pleased to congratulate one of our engineering team leaders, Nilesh Vaghela, on passing his Citrix Certified Administrator (CCA) exam today with a mark of 96%!

The high mark may be because Nilesh already has a great deal of practical experience in Citrix software solutions. He is valued by many of ISN’s clients as a consultant who can resolve IT issues and implement new IT solutions quickly, effectively and without fuss.

ISN has five other engineers who have gained the the CCA qualification, however Nilesh is the first to pass the newly released XenApp v5 exam.

For more information on what Citrix XenApp, XenServer and XenDesktop can do for your company, please contact one of our specialist solutions consultants on 020 7313 9900.

Congratulations to Tom Clowes, ISN’s senior support consultant, for passing NetApp’s Accredited Storage Architect Professional exam with a score of 90%!

This followed an intensive course at #NetApp UK HQ in Stockley Park where Tom was able to brush up on his knowledge of storage technology in general as well as learn all there is to know about the range of SAN and NAS storage solutions offered by NetApp.

This covered training on FAS2020, FAS2050, FAS3000 series and all the way up to FAS6080 filers as well as the core Snapshot technology which translates to easy data backup, file and volume restore (in seconds, not hours)and storage replication technology that is unmatched by any other vendor.

If you would like to explore how NetApp storage solutions can help your business, please contact us on 020 7313 9900 to arrange a demonstration, or come along to one of our short Demo Cafe briefings.

The annual conference for the EAGE - European Association of Geologists & Engineers - took place in Amsterdam last week - 8th to 11th June. A great opportunity for professionals in geophysics, petroleum exploration, geology, reservoir engineering, mining and civil engineering to get together for one of the key events of the oil and gas IT calendar.

As an IT infrastructure specialist for the Oil & Gas industry, London-based IT consultancy ISN Solutions partnered storage vendor Isilon Systems on their stand at the show. ISN have much experience of consultancy, design, project management, installation and support of IT and comms infrastructure for the oil & gas exploration and production sector.

With seismic data storage very much on the agenda and new applications for its manipulation and interpretation being showcased, ISN and Isilon where kept busy with interest on how best to manage the obvious storage implications, not just now, but allowing for likely growth patterns into the future.

Isilon’s scale-out NAS products offer unparalleled speed of access, uptime and cost effectiveness for storage of seismic data. Having evaluated the options available in the marketplace, we have been impressed by how easy  Isilon clustered NAS arrays are to manage and maintain. We have seen nothing that scales so well, while still maintaining extremely fast response times. Isilon’s product range includes solutions for storage needs from 5 Terabytes to over 5 Petabytes. Ideal for many geoscience applications.

Call us on 020 7313 9900  to tell us more about your storage challenges.

Congratulations to ISN engineers Alex Woolsey and Chris Territt who successfully completed the safety training necessary to work on offshore oil and gas facilities.

Both engineers underwent intensive combined OPITO approved training course covering:

• Basic Offshore Safety Induction & Emergency Training (BOSIET)
• Helicopter Underwater Escape Training (HUET)
• Escape System Training (Norwegian OLF standard)
• Emergency Breathing Systems (EBS)

Like other ISN engineers they are qualified to work offshore from the North Sea to the Tropics. ISN need to maintain readiness to work offshore at short notice to provide IT support and consultancy anywhere in the world for our oil & gas exploration and production customers.