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ISN’s technical consultants have put their heads together and come up with some practical advice for IT teams considering introducing virtualisation.

1 - Start small and work up

So that you and your team can familiarise yourselves with the concepts and issues around virtualisation, start with free or inexpensive tools like #Citrix #XenServer, #VMware ESX3i or VMware Workstation.

Try For your first production systems try running simple server workloads like Blackberry Enterprise Server, DHCP or secondary domain controllers.

2 - Take a phased approach

Don’t try to do everything all at once. Trying to do too much in one step is a recipe for downtime and disaster. Specialist consultancies can provide the tools and expertise to help you plan the best way to get to your desired end results.

3 - Don’t expect to be able to virtualise all of your systems

Sometimes you are better off with physical servers. Direct attached storage in the form of RAID arrays on an intelligent caching disk controllers will often give better performance for high throughput databases than virtual machines accessing shared iSCSI storage.

4 - Check compatibility of existing software applications

Confirm with vendors that their applications are supported on virtual machines and consider their recommendations when looking at server, network and backup options.

5 - Don’t forget about licensing

Remember OEM licenses are tied to the hardware they were bought with, so that you can’t simply convert a machine running OEM software and stay compliant. Each virtual Windows server or desktop would need its own operating system license - either volume or retail box.

6 - Think about backup and recovery up front

Although it is easier to back up and restore, a production virtual machine needs a proper rigorous backup regime in place to allow quick recovery from data loss. Choose products which are designed for virtual systems such as those from Vizioncore or Symantec.

7 - Upgrade hardware warranty

When you are running multiple production virtual machines on one physical server system, this become vital as any downtime is compounded. For HP servers ISN recommend 24/7 6 hour Call-to-repair or 4 hour response Carepack warranty extensions. Dell too offer a “4 hour Mission Critical” response add-on to their basic warranty.

8 - Build a solid foundation for the future

Don’t try to skimp and put your first production virtual machines on a low-end system as this will generally become your production environment before you know it. Hardware is cheap compared to the cost, disruption and inconvenience of rebuilding. There is also a cost to eroding users’ confidence in new systems by providing it on under-powered hardware. Choose reliable, fast server hardware with redundancy built in.

9 - Use shared storage for more flexibility

For non critical server workloads with very little data it is feasible to keep the data within the virtual machine. To get the most out of a virtual environment, realising the full benefits of disaster recovery, resilience, flexibility and performance, it is best to separate critical production data and locate it on a shared Storage Area Network (SAN) or high end Network Attached Storage (NAS) device.

10 - Plan network capacity for best performance

ISN use iSCSI or fibre channel accelerators in servers attached to a separate storage LAN with a dedicated switch fabric to guarantee fastest data access times and throughput between servers, shared storage and users. If your server uses the same LAN for iSCSI access to a SAN as it does to serve data to users, problems can arise.

11 - Use outside expertise to give you a head start

It can save a lot of time and money to use an experienced consultancy to get you started on your virtualisation project. ISN’s qualified consultants can help you get results fast and transfer practical skills to your own IT team.

If you have any questions about virtualisation or how it might work in your business, please leave a comment or call me at ISN on 020 7313 9900.

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.

This involves taking a snapshot image of a whole server (or desktop PC or laptop). If the server fails, the image can be used to recreate it the server on any hardware – doesn’t have to be identical - long as it has enough disk space and memory.

 What results will image backup give you? Read more »

An ISN client made the tough decision to make a few staff redundant because of the downturn. They have a tight procedure for handling logon account deactivation and return of security badge, etc. However one of the departing staff asked if his account could be reactivated from 5pm for half an hour so that he could finish off a key piece of documentation. His boss agreed to let him finish the work.

Data wiped out

The next day some of his former work mates found that about 15GB of file data had gone missing - 4,500 files. When the IT support team investigated, they saw from the logs on their NetApp Storage Area Network (SAN) system that a folder which was backed up at 5pm was no longer there at 6pm. On closer inspection, they were able to establish that the missing folders had been deleted at 5:20pm.

Snapshot restore

Their NetApp SAN is set up to take snapshots of all data at hourly intervals, so restoring to the 5pm copy meant that all of the deleted data was able to be restored completely. In addition, it took a mere 10 minutes from noticing that the data was gone to having it all back to normal.

Tape backup?

If our client had relied purely on tape backup then it would certainly have taken a lot longer; many companies only take a tape backup of their data once a day. This would mean that they would have lost a day’s work and it might have taken hours to get the previous might’s version restored.

Investigate better backup methods

The cost of storage is falling and the amount of data held by businesses is growing (some say the it doubles every two years). It is nearly always cheaper to add more space than to prune the data set down to size. However that can create other problems if the backup solution is not scaled up to match.

There are plenty of gotchas in IT. To avoid them, please call our consultants to get some practical advice. We are trained and experienced in providing infrastructure solutions which help businesses be productive, even when the unexpected happens.

ISN have recently been reassessed and reapproved for ISO9001:2008 quality management systems, standards and guidelines for the provision of information technology and telecommunications consultancy services.

The updated certification replaces our previous 9001:2000 accreditation and shows that the company has demonstrated its ability to consistently provide product that meets customer and regulatory requirements. ISO 9001:2008 also aims to enhance customer satisfaction through effective processes for continual improvement.

People often ask us for ways to share files with suppliers, partners and remote workers when those files are too big to be sent as email attachments. After testing a few different approaches we’ve found the easiest way to do it.

One solution has been to set up an FTP site but that can be cumbersome for non-IT people. If hosted on your internal network, it could swamp your internet connection, or even provide a way in for hackers.

Having evaluated various sharing websites, we have found what seems to be the perfect solution in a new service called ShareFile. You can even brand it to look like your web site.

It ticks all the boxes for what we needed:

• Data stored externally
• Secure and encrypted data storage and transfer
• Easy to use for anyone, specialist or not
• Easy to control access for different recipients
• Low cost

ShareFile offer a free trial on www.sharefile.com. If you want to try it out for 30 days without having to submit a credit card, please call me at ISN on 020 7313 9900.

Many business need to send out regular information to their clients and email is the easiest and cheapest way to do it. The wrong approach is to create an email message, attach a document and send it out to 1000 of your contacts. This could cripple your mail server for hours and maybe even get you blacklisted as a spammer.

Here are the two most important tips for creating your own mailshots: Read more »