Blog Entries for Phil Robinson

The Big Cloud in the Sky

phil@itnow.net — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 07:00:00 +0100

When I first heard the term cloud computing, I thought it was just putting your server in a data center and accessing it from anywhere. This is a similar concept, and has its benefits. About a year ago we lost power in our office for about 3 hours. All of our servers were in-house, connected to a big UPS battery backup that lasted all of about 20 minutes [...]

Virtually Amazing

phil@itnow.net — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 07:00:00 +0100

A couple of years ago we decided to dive into the world of server virtualization. This is an amazing technology that allows us to run multiple operating systems on a single server. One server can act like many. Microsoft servers run better when their tasks are focused. Take a mail server for example. You wouldn’t want your mail server to also host your [...]

Holy terabytes Batman!

phil@itnow.net — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 05:00:00 +0100

If I’d asked anyone what a thousand gigabytes is called 10 years ago, they’d look at my like I was crazy. No one could even fathom that much storage.

A few months ago, Seagate announced the worlds largest desktop hard drive, 1.5 TB. That TB means terabytes, otherwise known as 1,500 gigabytes, 1,500,000 megabytes, 1,500,000,000 kilobytes, you get the idea. To pu [...]

Passwords are a pain

phil@itnow.net — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 05:00:00 +0100

A few months back we had a client’s network compromised by a former employee, stealing information for a competitor. This network had a high end firewall, an encrypted wireless network, and security measures in place to prevent something like this from happening, yet it still happened.

It happened because people don’t [...]