Glo Networks Technical Blog (Glo Blog)

Exchange 2010 has just been released. Well it’s on MSDN and the like right now.

As expected there are many benefits to Exchange 2010 over it’s predecessors. Of which the one we at Glo Networks will probably notice right away is the rich OWA (Outlook Web Access) experience out of IE ! There are of course many other benefits which we’ll post about when we are happy with their commercial usefulness.

We’ll be upgrading our Exchange 2007 production server over the coming weekend. It shouldn’t be to much trouble as we have been playing with the test versions.

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Posted by Chris in Applications, Servers | No Comments »

Parallels have today released the newest version of their Desktop for Mac product. Parallels Desktop 5 for Mac is the latest offering of the Hardware Virtualization software for the Mac and boasts improved support for the Snow Leopard and Windows 7 operating systems among other new features.

For anyone who isnt familiar with the software it allows Mac users to run both the native Mac OS and a virtual machine with another OS on the same hardware at the same time.

The full product is available for £59.99 direct from Parallels, existing users can upgrade for £34.99. At Glo Networks we have been using the beta release of Desktop 5 for Macs for some months now and have experienced mix results, as such we would recommend signing up for the Trial before purchasing the full product.

We now have the release version of the product and will be testing, we’ll follow up soon with our thoughts

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Posted by James in General | No Comments »

As you may have heard Windows 7 has now launched, With Windows 7 comes a new Remote Desktop Client which has a lot of new features, the main ones you might be interested in are -

• Bidirectional Audio – You can redirect audio recording devices such as microphones on the client computer.
• Multiple Monitor Support – With the new Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services now has support for up to 16 monitors.
• Enhanced Video Playback – Bitmap acceleration improves graphics-intensive applications such as powerpoint, flash and silverlight.

You can find a full list of the changes and the download for Windows XP (SP3) and Windows Vista here

This new Remote Desktop Client is mainly to work with the new Remote Desktop Services (formally known as Terminal Services) of the new Windows Server 2008 R2 but can also be used to connect to remote Windows 7 computers whether it is phyiscal computer or a virtual one running on Server 2008 R2 Hyper-v host.

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Posted by Dave in Desktops and Laptops, Operating Systems | No Comments »

If you haven’t heard about Cloud Computing then I doubt you know what an iPhone is. There’s been a growing amount of press about this topic. I spotted The Economist covering this as their cover article this month. So what is Cloud Computing or The Cloud all about ? There are many interpretations of what Cloud Computing means, do you have gmail or hotmail account ? If so you already use Cloud Computing.

Like most companies we have a server or two to hold our data and offer an element of disaster recovery. However since our inception in 2007 all our servers have been hosted on the internet in a data center. Glo Networks entire system is hosted over 5 virtual servers running over 2 physical servers in separate data centers. So does that mean we’re fully using the Cloud ?

Well some takes on the Cloud are much more technically proficient. Google offer businesses a basic setup for email, document storage and full office applications. These are all stored online over multiple servers, very easy to access from any web browser and virtual free. Microsoft and Amazon are offering cloud resources to anyone. You write your application / website (something like Glo Help, our online helpdesk) you upload it to their cloud and it’s magically available to everyone. Their theory is that unlike most hosted solutions where you either have a server to yourself or share one with many hundreds of other people, your application sits across many servers. You won’t suffer if your server has problems and you experience slowdowns as your peers use bits of the network / server more than usual. Effectively everyone that is part of that cloud contributes to the cost of using a bunch of super computers.

Time for the industry to sort the definition out correctly ? Whatever happens over the next few years, we expect this topic to only getting more populated. Can cloud computing benefit your business today ? Without a doubt, just speak to someone that’s able to truly understand your needs and help you implement the right sized solution for your business.

Glo Networks can be contacted in the UK on 0845 5210 140 or via our website at glo-networks.com.

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Posted by Chris in General | No Comments »