While we’ve had a GloNetworks twitter account for some time our tweets up to this point have been few and far between. But now we feel we’re ready to up our tweet game and we’ll be tweeting far more regularly. If you’re interested on what we’ve got to say, or want some real time updates on what’s going for Glo, then please follow us here.
Google has got a question to ask you: What do you love?
Their newest service takes your answer and pulls results from a plethora of Google services. It then displays all the results it gets from these in boxes (1 box per service) on one results page.
While searching across the numerous services Google provides could be a handy tool, unfortunately, at the moment it feels a bit like a cheap advert for everything Google.
Some of the boxes don’t really display search results, but rather just contain automatically generated image showing an example of how your search term could be used on the specified service (for example when we tried the search term ‘God’ the Google Calendar box shows a diary with an event for today’s date called ‘Date with God’). At the moment the best use for the page is probably just to find Google services that you may not even know exist.
Although the ‘What do you love?’ site is active at both www.wdyl.com and www.google.com/whatdoyoulove/ there’s not yet been an announcement from Google regards the tool. Also there is a box on the results page that states ‘More coming soon!’. Perhaps this means that Google intends to change some things before officially announcing.
You may or may not know that yesterday was IPv6 day. Amongst some of us networking nerds that was a fairly big thing.
As we’ve previously mentioned in our article The sky is falling on our heads; We’re running out of addresses, IPv4 addresses are running out. To very quickly recap IPv6 is the technology to replace this. The problem is that IPv6 has a chicken and egg situation; no content is being delivered on IPv6, so there are few mass roll outs of IPv6. But why would anyone publish on IPv6 if no one is going to see it?
The point of IPv6 day was to get a number of high profile websites running both IPv6 and IPv4 on their main addresses, and to see what happened. How many out of the total IPs were hitting those companies providing their content on IPv6? If we take facebook as an example, about 0.5%.
Now you may think that’s not many. But it’s more than a lot might have thought. That’s half a percent with working IPv6, either through a tunnel or natively from their provider(s).
The really good thing is that many network engineers were predicting that because of a number of automatic tunneling protocols, there would be a lack of connectivity to major participants. From the figures we’re seeing published publicly at the moment, it seems to have been a much smaller number than many were predicting.
Sadly Glo Networks was not one of the exclusive club. Our equipment is now in a datacentre that will have IPv6 connectivity soon, however we’re waiting on them.
The fact that nothing overtly bad was reported to us makes us believe that IPv6, whilst quiet, is the start of the migration.
Since the birth of Glo Networks we’ve been virtualising servers and desktops. Those of us who worked together before Glo Networks was started have been virtualising since early 2003. It’s fair to say that we love virtualising stuff. Several of us virtualise our own home systems.
It saves you money on power, hardware and in some cases because of how Microsoft’s licensing works, we’ve actually reduced the number of licenses that some of our customers had to buy. In early 2007, we started hosting systems and services online – both ours and one of our very first customer’s. It could be said that we were at the forefront of “cloud computing”, mere weeks before the term was coined.
Recently we came to terms with the fact that our platform needed a good redesign. It had grown with us and our customers, but it was coming a bit unwieldy to maintain. Last month we put in our new solution – a small Hyper-V cluster, backed up by Microsoft’s DPM 2010, powered by IBM X Series x3550 M3′s, an IBM x3250 M3, an IBM DS3512 disk system, a QNAP TS-459+ and HP Procurve 2800 series switch.
We’re still migrating our services and customers to it, but boy does it make a difference. With all our hardware consolidated and updated we’re seeing more responsive, more manageable and more highly available systems.
Would we do anything different? Probably, but that’s the way we are at Glo Networks; always striving for something better and trying to push the limit available to us at that time.
If you’re interested we’ll be following this up with a more technical post about how we setup our cluster.
I would like to say that I’m surprised that it’s been over a month since our last ILOW, but frankly things have been busy at Glo Towers. Good busy, naturally.
