I’m using the iPad 2 more and more for note taking and general writing, email and even writing blog posts! I’ve been looking for a suitable keyboard for a while; the Bluetooth keyboard I use with my MacBook Pro when at my desk isn’t really suitable as its too cumbersome to carry and doesn’t really integrate with the iPad’s portability.
Step forward Adonit Writer; I’ve only just ordered this from Amazon so I can’t really comment, I’ll be sure to post a review in the next few weeks. Suffice to say though, of all of the devices I’ve considered, this is is the only one I’ve felt the urge to take the plunge and buy!
I’ve been looking into office 365 today for a client with several thousand mailboxes.
For those of you that aren’t aware, Office 365 is a flexible per user/per month subscription service with a number of plan and service options. Based upon Microsoft Exchange 2010, Office 365 is an upgrade and replacement for Microsoft Online Services, which was sold as a suite under the name “Business Productivity Online Services” or “BPOS.” Office 365 has been priced aggressively but it is slightly more expensive than Google, although Office 365 has the benefit of Microsoft Exchange at the backend; price alone is not be the reason to choose one or the other. Organisations with existing investment in Microsoft Office would normally choose Office 365.
Now, for the maths. Office 365 is priced at £5.92 per mailbox per month (when purchasing several thousand mailboxes). For a typical medium sized business of 2000 users, this equates to £11,840 per month!
I can see this being a solution for small companies but anyone with an existing data centre footprint, internal IT expertise and some capacity, I really can’t see cloud based messaging being cost effective at these prices.
What a nightmare, there is so much mis-information in the blogosphere (or at least outdated information) that it makes it very difficult to understand the latest licensing stance.
According to VMware’s own vSphere pricing guide:
No Limits on Physical Resources
VMware vSphere 5 licensing removes all restrictions on physical cores and physical RAM. This change eliminates barriers to deploying VMware vSphere on new multicore server configurations, improving customers’ ability to choose server hardware that best meets their requirements.”
vRAM Entitlements
Each vSphere 5 license provides a vRAM capacity entitlement. vRAM is defined as the memory configured to a virtual machine. When a virtual machine is created, it is configured with a certain amount of memory (vRAM) available to the virtual machine.
The vRAM entitlements of VMware vSphere processor licenses are pooled—that is, aggregated—across all CPU licenses managed by a VMware vCenter instance (or multiple linked VMware vCenter instances) to form a total available vRAM capacity (pooled vRAM capacity).”
Therefore if a theoretical configuration includes 18 physical cores (across 9 hosts) with a total of 1152GB RAM, the licensing requirements will be for 18 physical cores and will allow for a pooled vRAM capacity of 1728GB for vShphere Enterprise Plus.
Correct?
Sorry it’s been a while since I posted. For those who care it’s been really busy with work recently (even more so than usual).
I’ve got a plenty of updates stacked up, including a new vSphere lab when I get some time to document more fully, but in the meantime…….
…….Newcastle United, third in the Premiership in case you haven’t noticed!
November 3rd, 2011 in
Uncategorized |
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Last weekend four of us took a long awaited trip to the Celtic Manor resort in Newport, Wales. The same resort that hosted the 2010 Ryder Cup, which was of course won by Europe. We’d paid for a two night, three round executive package which began with 18 holes of the Montgomerie course, designed by Ryder Cup captain Colin Montgomerie, the course measures 6,371 yards and has a par of 69. My golf was abysmal to put it mildly but it was topped off with an eagle 2 on the par 4 tenth hole. Unfortunately that’s as good as it got for me, with my stableford score being in the single figures! The course itself was in excellent condition but having a buggy was somewhat a waste due to the requirement to stay on the pavement around the course at all times, this resulted in some long walks to your ball, not knowing which club to take. Although we were later told that there are no winter greens or winter tee’s ever used and that the course was in good condition year round so I guess the rule has paid off in that respect.
The evening saw us having a meal in The Lodge restaurant; the food was outstanding! Once we had eaten we dutifully went to collect our clubs which we had left in the lodge changing rooms, only to find all four sets had “disappeared.” Much hilarity ensued, culminating in our clubs re-apearing the next morning outside of the lodge!
Sunday was the famous 2010 course, the weather of course matched my golf and was terrible for our allotted tee time but things brightened up after the first few holes, at least the weather did as my golf was, if possible, even worse than the Saturday! Afterwards we ate at the 2010 clubhouse Rafters restaurant which was as good (or better than) The Lodge restaurant.
Finally, on Monday we played the Roman Road course and I finally started to hit a few good shots during the back nine, so much so I amounted to over 20 points!
All in all, a great weekend only dampened by my SkyCaddie SGX giving up the ghost half way through the 2010 course, on the bright side they are replacing it for me and I should have a new unit in the next few days.
I’ve been playing with Google + (or Google Plus) for a week or so now and after getting over the initial unfarmiliarity of the whole platform I have started to quite like it.
I don’t have too many friends or contacts yet as there aren’t too many people with accounts (the platform is invite only at present); as soon as it’s generally released though I think take up will be quite high.
FaceBook is the obvious competition Google are trying to topple here but Google + does offer some neat features that aren’t available on the FaceBook platform, take Circles as an example; you can create groups (circles) using a dashboard, by dragging contacts from the top of the screen to the Circles at the bottom. You can create as many circles as you like and name them anything you like. Your contacts don’t see which Circles they’re in. When you post anything, you can decide which of your Circles can see it. I’ve not explained it too well but it is a really powerful feature.
I’ll play with it some more and maybe post a more detailed review in the future; in the meantime, if you’d like an invite to Google + just drop me a note with your email address and I’ll fix you up.
Apples much anticipated WWDC 2011 takes place this month, June 6-10.
From the photo here it looks to be including iOS 5, OS X Lion, and iCloud at least.
Less likely is iPhone 5?
Most of the clients I have worked at recently have had a policy to “lock down” the speed and duplex of switch ports and network interfaces. I’ve also had first hand experience of extremely poor throughput when using auto negotiate which is dramatically improved when the speed and duplex of the ports is manually set.
With the above in mind, I was speaking to a network guy on the current project I am working on today who wholeheartedly disagreed with this and insisted that auto negotiate should always be used these days. I did some research and found the following interesting articles which seemed to back up what he was saying:
June 2nd, 2011 in
IT | tags:
Ethernet,
Network |
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Well, golf was a washout today, much as was expected. Hit some balls on the range though and I’m much happier with my swing, the release was my major issue and now that at least I understand that, I am hitting around 8/10 shots consistently well. I just need to improve on that and I’m sure I will get better.
Instead of playing a round of golf I hit the gym for an hour followed by swim and spa, highlight of the day was seeing Chris Evans finish his round of the Brabazon course and fly off in a helicopter.
Anyway, I’m hoping to get a round in tomorrow. I need to submit three cards fro the Derby course to get a handicap again, then I can play in the monthly competitions.
Now for some exciting news; I bought myself two new golf clubs yesterday, a Ping Rapture v2 hybrid and a Nike SV Plus wedge, shown in the pictures.
I was hoping to try them out today but the weather isn’t great and I’m a fair weather golfer so the gym it is!
Once I do get chance to use them out on the course I will probably post an update with a short review for your pleasure 
May 30th, 2011 in
Golf | tags:
Hybrid,
Nike,
Ping |
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