metro

You are currently browsing the archive for the metro category.

New PC

5:46 am, October 7, 2009 in journal, metro, tech | 2 comments

Don’t you love it when purchasing PC parts, you get them all unboxed and start putting them together but then you realize that something you have isn’t compatible, or you forgot to order something? Yeah, sure is fun.

I’m building ash and myself a slightly more modern computer than what we have now and I thought I ordered everything I needed. It was all delivered yesterday so last night I started putting things together only to get to the power supply and realize that the main motherboard power connector from my power supply is only 20-pin, not 24-pin. Doh. So time to order a new power supply.

In the end, here is what I ordered:

The motherboard has an HDMI output on it and Ash’s 21.5-inch LCD (Hanns·G HH-221HPB Black 21.5″ 5ms HDMI Widescreen LCD Monitor – Retail) has an HDMI input so I figure we’ll give that a shot versus VGA.

I love how affordable PC parts are these days. It’s so cheap to buy 4GB of memory for a PC when a few years ago, that would cost hundreds of dollars.

I hope to put Windows 7 on this beast and it should be pretty awesome.

Also, I think I have the flu and it sucks. Tired/achy/headache/sore throat/congested/101.2F temperatre/sudden onset of symptoms/etc. I have never felt so sick – yesterday anyway. I feel a little better today but not well enough to go in to work. I took a sick day yesterday and lazed around the house. Last night I started feeling better but that’s always how it goes – I feel so terrible during the day but after a shower in the evening, I get some of my strength back. It happens every time I get sick. So today I’m working from home. I hope to install VMware ESX 3.5 Update 4 on 3 new blades that we have at work and then upgrade them to ESX4 to see how the process goes.

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/influenza/DS00081/DSECTION=symptoms

Tags: ,

Published: VDI adds new wrinkle to data center storage management

10:18 pm, September 30, 2009 in metro, vmware | No comments

Got myself interviewed and mentioned in another VDI article, Virtual desktop infrastructure adds new wrinkle to data center storage management, though this one for some reason pegs me as being at The MetroHealth System in Cleveland. Oh well. I emailed the correction but got an out-of-office auto-reply.

One administrator in a large VDI environment said his IT staff still doesn’t back up desktop data, though it lives on data center storage. “If an individual desktop goes down, we’re just going to assign the user to a new one and reinstall their applications,” said Chris House, senior network analyst at The MetroHealth System, a hospital network based in Cleveland. MetroHealth uses 1,500 VMware virtual desktops and stores data on a Hewlett-Packard Co. StorageWorks XP1024 high-end disk array.

House said the initial VDI deployment was done using a midrange HP StorageWorks EVA8000 array, but with more than a thousand desktops, the IOPS required pushed it up to tier 1 storage. “The VDI environment was averaging between 4,000 and 9,000 IOPS most of the time, but once a week at 2 a.m. it would spike to 40,000 IOPS,” he said.

The spike was accounted for by an inventory scan process that involved all the desktops. “The [XP] array can handle it, but you lose some ROI going with more expensive storage,” House said.

We are also mentioned in a new VMware case study on VDI and there’s still that video…

Tags: , ,

Published: Virtual desktop infrastructure case study: Metro Health

5:50 am, March 17, 2009 in metro, vmware | No comments

Virtual desktop infrastructure case study: Metro Health

The storage issues that are more critical in a VDI environment include capacity planning and management and performance, as illustrated by a case study of early adopter Metro Health, an independent health care system serving the greater Grand Rapids area and western Michigan.

via Virtual desktop infrastructure tutorial: Part 1 .

A very excellent two-part article (though Metro is only featured in the first part) based on content from an interview I gave to SearchStorage back in February regarding our experience with VDI and the storage issues/expense we have encountered.

Tags: , , , ,

ISPs Report Record Video Traffic During Inauguration

8:21 am, January 22, 2009 in metro, tech | No comments

Pretty cool, from eWeek:

The Obama inauguration was the most viewed live video event in Internet history. CNN.com broke its old record of 5.3 million live video streams, set on election night in 2008, by serving up more than 25 million live video streams globally, CNN says. Akamai, which has about 2,800 enterprise customers, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Viacom Web sites, reports a peak of 7 million active simultaneous streams at the coverage’s zenith.

via eWeek: ISPs Report Record Video Traffic During Inauguration.

I briefly watched it on my PC at work via our local multicast streaming TV installation deployed throughout the hospital, before heading home for lunch to finish watching it there.

Tags: , , ,

Metro Health builds video-over-IP network

10:30 pm, December 24, 2008 in metro, tech | No comments

Nice article that appeared in the November/December 2008 issue of AV Technology Magazine, reprinted by Visionary Solutions, Inc. – the vendor of the 57 AVN-220 video encoding blades that we use: Just what the doctor ordered

Since opening the doors to a brand new 208 bed facility just over a year ago, Metro Health has been receiving high marks for patient satisfaction, not just for its cutting edge health care technology but for its innovative IP-based patient education and entertainment system that goes above and beyond the norm.

It is a pretty cool solution since it’s all IP-based, and most of it is available to PC users right at their desks using the VLC media player client to join the multi-cast streams of the different TV channels.

« Older entries