pigeon faster than the internet - official!

This is blatantly taken from Private Eye - originally spotted by David Dallison who saw it in Gulf News, 11/9/09.

"Internet speeds are hopelessly slow in South Africa," a spokesman for Unlimited IT told reporters in Pietermaritzburg, "because Telekom controls most of the phone lines, and the won't make the necessary investment to upgrade them. There's a national bandwidth shortage, so speed and connectivity are poor, and the internet is also expensive. That's why we decided to stage a contest, to see who could transmit data fastest - the Telekom internet system, or a carrier pigeon. "At the same moment we began trying to transmit data to our Durban office, we strapped a data card to theleg of an eleven-month-old pigeon walled Winston, and released him from our office here in Pietermaritzburg. He took one hour and eight minutes to fly 80 kms to our office in Durban, where the data card was removed from his leg and the information was downloaded. The total time taken was two hours, six minutes and fifty-seven seconds, by which time only four per cent of the same data had been transferred using a Telekom line. We've asked Telekom to comment, but so far they haven't replied"

Brilliant!

laptops - failures and warranties.

having recently had a laptop fail on me i was interested to notice annual stats showing that a third of all laptops fail over a three year period. I have allways been an advocate of extended warranties (as much as it pains me), and this definately re-inforces that view.

whilst the stats are put together by a company that sells warranties there is some useful information on what is the most reliable make. Its worth knowing that laptop parts can be insanely expensive - a logic board or screen can cost almost the full initial value of the laptop. Accidental damage is also relevant. Some insurers include accidental damage, but not computer malfunction. Make sure you read the small-print as some insurers cover malicious damage only, but not other damage.

The study can be downloaded here:
http://www.squaretrade.com/htm/pdf/SquareTrade_laptop_reliability_1109.pdf

2008 r2 virtualisation

At the same time as windows 7 release, windows server r2 has also been released. Many have overlooked this as the 2003 r2 release provided little in the way of features. This time this is very much not the case.

Whilst 2008 added hyper-v virtualisation many criticised it for a lack of advanced features such as automatic high availability. The lack of these features has forced the implementation of costly 3rd party solutions (vmware/xen).

r2 addresses these issues by implementing them at no additional cost. The enterprise version allows you to run four virtual copies of winows server at no additional cost. This means you can install a second domain controller, fileserver, mailserver etc. all on one machine. Now the obvious issue here is that the single point of failure is the physical machine that the systems are running on. Here comes the clever bit. using supported storage medium. Now this traditionally means an expensive fibre channel SAN system, but these days high level kit is much cheaper and there are lots of options. Whatever route is chosen the result is a reliable box of storage space. It is then possible to plug into this shared storage two servers (removing the previous single point of failure) running R2. As they are running R2 which supports "live migration". What this means is that the virtual machine runs on machine 1. A mouse-click can cause the machine to move to the second physical machine without any reboot.

What is less well publicised is that as well as manual migration R2 also brings automated migration, so if a server dies then its machines will automatically move to the other active server. Obviously there are licensing implications in this, but clearly this is a must-have feature. What this means additionally is that old-school active/passive clustering suddenly becomes pointless, as paying money to have a server ready to jump into action is not needed. Instead the second server can run useful services.

This probably marks the beginning of a price war between the different offerings.

http://www.microsoft.com/hyper-v-server/en/us/default.aspx