Adventures of a Technical MasterMind

My team is running yet another move from internally hosted DNS to Akamai EDNS. I've done the same at CCBN and Thomson on other projects previously. The product is great, and the design is superb. We should start moving on Tuesday for web forwarding (from godaddy) and using Akamai EDNS on Wednesday. I look for improves response times and much better DNS resiliency than we had before. More when its implemented J

Built out our new datacenter, I was in Geneva for the last 12 days. We are getting ready to move our US hosting facility to Geneva to get ready to merge the MFG and sourcingparts environments. Its going to take several months overall, but the first steps are going to occur in the next few weeks. Everything went really well, we installed and moved a lot of gear, servers, F5 Big-ips, (Unknown Vendor) HA firewalls, and a nice Netapp 3040 dual head cluster. The only issue was that we got a quad 1gig card in it versus the 10G copper card we wanted. Netapp only makes a 10G fiber card, so we had to buy different switch modules as well. Netapp ate the extra cost on the cards for us, which was nice. We also can't run LACP on the 10G fiber cards, so we lose switch redundancy. The Netapp is currently serving Vmware ESXi over NFS, and it screams. We also are using iSCSI for our MSSQL clusters. The speeds on Vmware and iSCSI are very good even with the current 4G we are running unt

I arrived in lovely Geneva on Tuesday morning, and let some of the guys, as well as one of the engineers who works for me here. Great cool city, reminds me of Banff. We spent some time in the datacenter preparing, and getting acquainted with the staff and facility. We unpacked all of the gear, around 4 tons total, it was a lot of work. Today we started racking and configuring after working on some stuff in the office first. Trying to install some new DCs, access points, CA, and RADIUS authentication for 802.1x using dd-wrt. Still need to finish this work tomorrow, we also have Netapp coming in to finish the configuration of the new FAS3040s we bought. Had a great dinner with some of the guys here in France, and doing a bunch of work tonight to catch up. More as we progress, I'll be here for another 8 days working on the datacenter. Nite.