Church IT Podcast Discussions Episode 21 December 20, 2007
Jason
Hey, welcome everybody to Episode 21, today is Thursday, December 20, 2007. Very few people are here. We now have 10 of the 20 podcasts transcribed. You can search those. Today is an open forum. We’ve been asked to announce that tomorrow is the cut-off for the Sharepoint training. Hit my blog, www.jasonpowell.net or Jason Lees’ www.jasonmlee.net
It’s free for us IT church folks, sign up today!
Tony is there any Spring Roundtable new news?
Where’ Tony? Bummer. {TonyD: sorry, on vacation, a few minutes late getting in front of a computer}
We’re still trying to find a place for the Roundtable portion of the Ministry Tech. If we can’t do it on Saturday, what if we do it before Ministry Tech? No decision made on that yet?
What do you want to talk about today? Christmas? The Xbox 360 is coming.
Sp
You gonna have that hooked up in front of the treadmill?
Jason
That would be sweet! Try playing Halo 2 while running on the treadmill.
Here comes Tony.
William
I think I might have something potentially useful. I wasn’t at the last talkcast and I listened to it recorded and I heard you guys talking about logging solutions. One of the things I’ve found useful for in particular firewall and routers is Wall Watcher [?] basically that was born out of someone’s frustration with a commercial product and I’ve experienced the same kind of things and they want an annual fee and they don’t really do anything worth the money, this tool does do a good job for firewalls especially but also routers. The nice thing is that it is 100% free. I will put the URL in the chat. If you do have a little money, this is a service provider tool, called Sawmill, www.sawmill.net think of it as the universal log viewer server, if it is a log, you can probably read it [Time Stamp00:07:34] with this.
Sp
Is it a server for log aggregation.
William
No so much a server as an aggregator. You would probably put it on a server but basically it is a specialized interpretation program that allows you to point it at files and you can either let it auto identify or if you know specifically what type of file you can tell it a certain type of file and it stores it in its internal database and allows you to generate reports from that.
Jason
One of the things I’ve been keeping my eye is Paglo www.paglo.com They are claiming to be google for IT. All of your IT data goes in this search engine, so you just start searching. Go to the website and watch their video demo. It is sweet. It’ supposed to parse all of your server logs, everything, wmi, hop inside all your desktops and servers and sift out everything, you can build a network map, the web page makes it look really sweet. I keep watching it, it is a permanent tab in my Firefox.
Sp
We have a first time listener in here today, he may have some questions that we can help with. We’re here to help.
Jason
I just got a text from Jason Lee.
Sp (Serge?)
I have a question. How do you guys measure the amount of bandwidth you need for streaming let’s say if you use Churchquest.com. A 20 gig bandwidth for $8 or something.
Let’s say if you have a 300KB or 768KB streaming, how much bandwidth with say 1,000 people streaming.
Jason
You’re trying to stream that through a provider like Churchquest right? All you gotta do is get them to feed and then they will take care of all the rest. As long as you’ve got enough bandwidth between you and Churchquest, you are in good shape. Let’s say you are doing 300KB, I’d say you need at least a 768 just to make sure you’ve got good overhead. That’s [Time Stamp00:13:27] all upload, so your upload is the critical piece there. But if you’ve got just a single T1, that’s more than enough to send a 300KB stream to Churchquest, then Churchquest has the responsibility to make sure they then bump that out to anybody that wants to watch it. Are you trying to do a cost analysis?
Serge
Yes, on the website, the most we transfer is about 20 gig but I don’t know if that will be enough if you have more people trying to stream that.
Jason
I see, that’s harder to calculate.
Serge
How do you guys find out how much traffic you have been generating through Churchquest as far as broadcast?
Jason
They’ve got a statistics package. I believe it tells you what your bandwidth is. It will tell you how many viewers per session, how long they were viewing on average. It should give you a break down. I don’t have any more on that because we just use Churchquest for our private stuff so it is not public, so we don’t really care about the private stuff. Good question though.
Serge
Another question on VM ware. Most of you guys VM ware. What happens if you have to do maintenance on a box that has 5 virtuals on it? How do you handle that? If the primary needs to be maintained, does everything fall back to the secondary machine? Are they on cluster mode?
Jason
Most of us that are just using the free VM ware server product, we’ve just got to physical servers and if we have to do maintenance on one, we have a maintenance window on Tuesday night, we come late and work on servers, take them online and offline and patches and updates, so there is not really any v-motion capability, but if you paid for the VI3 products, you’ve got the ability to move you VMs from one box to another and you can take a box down and nobody knows. So we just plan and wait until Tuesday. [Time Stamp00:17:18] It does effect any virtual machine on that box. But typically we don’t re-boot our host boxes, only if we need to move cables or something.
Make sure you’re not monkeying with the host operating system. Take your physical box, put whatever on their and don’t dork with it. You should have no issues, unless you have problems with the box, but that’s the beauty of VM ware, I can have a physical box die and I just go over to the other physical box and I’m up and running, assuming you have enough horse power.
Anybody else on VM ware?
Tony could say something on ESX.
Tony
It works really, really, well even when you don’t expect it to, which is probably the best. We’ve got three identical boxes running virtual center and we had one of our boxes take a hardware hiccup and we didn’t even know it, everything magically moved off, was up and running on the other two, and I had to talk to the guys about missing an alert there, but basically they came in and said, “Wow, one of our boxes is down, wonder when that happened?” and everything was running and nobody knew the difference. Great stuff. It costs money, but life’s tough.
Jason
I’m sure you went back to your guys and said, “Perhaps we should have something in place that tells us when this has occurred.”
Tony
Perhaps we should check the mechanism that is already in place. We have pretty good alerting systems, our problem is we find other things we wish we had been watching for, so the target now is to make sure we never go through that same exercise twice for the same problem. I yell if they miss the same thing twice.
Jason Lee
Like having back-ups on your SAN over your configuration.
Tony
Yes, things like that. I’ve heard of people not having that.
Jason Lee
Smart people can make dumb mistakes.
Tony
Yeah, [Time Stamp00:21:02] like having a knowledge base that has everything you would ever want to know in it, like what to do if the knowledge base isn’t working, how do you bring the knowledge base back up? Make sure you have that one somewhere else.
Redundancy, never go down, come back up stuff, that’s neat stuff to work on but how do you ever know if you’ve got it right or not? You never know you got it wrong until you find out you got it wrong. And then you just have to go back and try not to get it wrong the same way the next time, which is pretty unlikely to ever occur again. Like Bette from Datacore said when they had the hurricane, "check the refrigerator."
I was late coming in, forgive me if you said this. Have you promoted the CIT RT chat session? That’s worth repeating to everybody several times?
Jason
I haven’t talked about it today. You want to fire up an IRC client. Ed and Dave are both using Icechat, a free IRC client, I’m running Chatzilla which is a Firefox add-on, and once you load those, the IRC server you want to connect to is www.Freenode.net and the channel you want to join is CIT RT you may have to put a # in front of CIT RT. Basically it is a 24/7 chat room where a number of us hang out from time to time. You’ll find people in there until midnight some nights. We’ve even started discussing the Fall 208 Roundtable a little bit. Trying to convince Trace to hold it at Seacoast. I think we may have to help him a little bit, he doesn’t have a huge staff. I think it would be awesome to do it there. Then we could go up to ACS and hang out and see Dean’s digs. My vote is Seacoast Fall 2008. This would be awesome! We did this in college, 4 of us, when we graduated we had this graphical artist who lived across the hall from us made these t-shirts for us, said Fearsome Foursome, [Time Stamp00:25:59] had all this cool stuff, on the back it had the locations where we lived like a concert tour shirt. So it would be cool to have a church IT Roundtable t-shirt that we add to every year. I’ll take a picture. That would rock. At least in my mind, it looks cool.
Tony do you have anything else on the Spring Roundtable?
Jason Lee
David D. is working on a Saturday location. He might have information today or tomorrow.
Tony
I’m hoping we can come up with a Saturday. That works better for everybody except the host churches, little detail.
Jason
I got some other news items. You can still join in the Biggest Loser contest. There are 16 of us now. There’s $400 bucks up for grabs plus a GPS unit donated through VR 6 systems, I need to do a blog post about it.
If you need ram for laptops, desktops, servers, let me know. If you are interested in Equal Logic, I got the man to give you the hook-up. We are also working with Allen for special pricing for our group.
Today I was ordering Dell computers to be shipped straight to India as we now have 3 staff people in India, so we are now multi-site in India. We get to do IT support from
America to India!
Tony
Do you have to talk funny and change your name?
Jason
It is interesting. I’ve been talking to the Dell rep, is there such thing as on-site support in India? Can we have next day business service for hardware issues? They said absolutely. 4 hour service if you want. Sadly, I bet a lot of money that the techs that would come on-site and fix your machine in India would be a much higher caliber than the interesting people who come here to do our Dell servicing. Just my guess.
Sp (I think he either said Rick or Greg)
Jason, are you leasing your machines or did you purchase them?
Jason
Everything [Time Stamp00:30:24] over the $5,000-$8,000 range, I typically try to lease unless the money is just sitting there ready to go. Like today, we had to get this done, we’ve got money set aside, bam, make it happen. The 40 units we just finished yesterday, those were all through Dell financial services, but we are trying to get into a 4-year rotation almost on replacing one-fourth of the machines on site once every 4 years. We do a three year lease, at the end of the lease, we do the $ buy out lease. So at the end of the lease, the stuff is yours, then we will try to let them run one more year, then we sell them or donate then or whatever.
Sp
How closely does your IT group work with the media group that does video and audio production?
Jason
Each church is different. In some churches, the IT and creative media people don’t get along very well, which is sad. In our particular environment we have a great working relationship with those guys. Every Thursday we go out to lunch and eat and chat and talk about projects and we are physically in the same office space. So I can look out my window and see our Technical Arts Director, our AV Engineer and some of their folks here in the same office space. A lot of synergy, talking, like what if we want to start recording stuff? Do streaming? Storage? Macs? Opportunity for us to have conversation.
Sp
That’s great, we also ended up being the same group so there is a lot of overlap.
Jason
Even better. I think what I see happening, the Creative Technical Arts, there is a lot of push into the Mac stuff, because you’ve got Final Cut, why shouldn’t you use it? It makes sense. Then you’ve got IT, which may not be very Mac-savvy, so there’s the potential for those two to butt heads, there could be friction there, so I encourage [Time Stamp00:33:45] people to get together, force yourself to talk about projects.
Sp
That’s great, that leads me into my next question. I found this talkcast searching for a multi-media talkcast. Do you know if there any more creative talkcasts? Or can you get your Creative Director to do something like that. We’ve got all these different pieces of equip that we’ve strung together the best way we know as far as switch to connect channels from point A to point B and route this to the TV and this to the nursery, etc. I’m just wondering if there is a talkcast to share some of our knowledge.
Jason
I’m doing a quick Google, there is a podcast called church tech, I’m not aware of a talk cast but there is a podcast.
Tony
Check out what Anthony Coppedge is doing. He is certainly a starting point, like Jason is the starting point for all things IT, Anthony is a good starting point for audio visual stuff. I don’t remember him doing anything interactive but I don’t watch it real closely.
Sp
I think we are getting closer to the answer to my question. I’ve been considering following Jason’s model here and apply it over to the multi-media side of things and I’m sure there is a demand out there. I don’t want to take over this one, I’ll back off and let somebody else take the stage.
Tony
Also, check in with Terrill Sanders at MinistryCOM and MinistryTECH because he is touching into both sides of that stuff and even though he is probably not doing what you are interested in, he has all the connections. Between he and Coppedge, you should be in good shape.
Jason Lee
Are there no connections through the Willow Creek Associations and the Arts Conference?
Tony
Seems like there would be, but who knows?
Jason
I’ve [Time Stamp00:36:43] got a Google alert set up for anything church tech related and I don’t see anything Willow hardly ever popping up.
Tony
They do good stuff but they publicize it weirdly.
Jason
Right, it is not as out there, it’s like ‘come to our conference and we’ll tell you about it’. One podcast is Church Tech Talk. www.AnthonyCoppedge.com
Sp
Thanks. Sounds good. I may use your talkcast to help launch mine.
Jason
There is the Godbit channel. David Russell is from National Church in Washington D.C. Sometimes he is on here with us. He is more of the media arts side of things.
Other things? Speaking of storage, we are checking out Data Domain. They’ve got some replication stuff, looks very cool. This guy from VR6 Systems not only does Equal Logic but also does Data Domain so we are digging deeper into that.
Serge
Were they bought buy Dell recently?
Jason
Yes. I don’t think that takes effect until the first of the year. It will probably be a power vault will be a re-branded Equal Logic box. But as far as I know Equal Logic will continue to operate their support pretty much as is. We’ll see how that plays out. Their support is what I really enjoy. But the product works so well, you don’t need much support, but if you’ve got questions.
We’ve been talking about how we do voice technology. We are going to try to start out with Skite [?], we’ve talked about Adobe Connect to have a room with all these available so our guys over here can have an online meeting with our team in India, web cams going on, document libraries. I need to call our Adobe rep again.
Sp
[This speaker was echoing terribly, I could not hear him].
Jason
We’ve asked about the ability to do it onsite here, and the sales rep [Time Stamp00:42:12] said yes but the price to do that is crazy and that is as far as I went with it.
Sp
[same speaker, something about Flash media server maybe? Something about developers, sorry I just couldn’t hear it]
Jason
I wish we had some developers.
We’re not using Astericks.
Same speaker
We are using Astericks, [something about calling trees I think]. If you’ve got 500 people to call, it’s a lot cheaper.
Justin
I would love to hear more about that. I’ve been evaluating whether or not to purchase a phone tree, which would work out of the box or to look at implementing an Astericks, we are a small congregation, 250, I wanted to do it with Astericks and piggyback it to my phone here at the office. All the calls would be local, there would be no additional out of pocket costs for my company or the church but I got lazy and didn’t feel like writing it myself so I’m on the verge of purchasing.
Sp
If you get the right hardware and have an empty box, it’s dirt cheap. You just get a provider that gives you the hooks to the pstm, it’s like a penny a minute. Give me a call and I’ll walk you down the path.
Sp
What protocol do you use?
Sp
To voicebox, we are using IX2 in the office because most of the phones are Linksys, inside the office is not as much of an issue. But for the business that I work for, we have voice over IP running through VPN tunnel, that seems to work fairly well except around lunch time when everybody decides to get on the Internet and watch the news.
Sp
What kind of pipe?
Sp
The company I work for is small, we’ve got 6 lines going out.
Sp
We have a PRI coming into our Astericks here, that’s where we get our pstm connectivity.
Sp
We have two, we use the PRI for inbound, all the outbound, long distance [Time Stamp00:47:31] and international calls we use the voice over IP which cuts back on some of the cost related to the long distance charges. Verizon who is providing the PRI was charging us about 7 cents per minute for long distance, where as the provider is about 2 cents per minute.
Jason
Anybody use Skipe [Stipe? Not sure what he is saying?] for across the world conversation?
Jason Lee
We are getting ready to start using it a little bit more with our involvement with the Willow Creek Summit in Brazil and then our involvement in the Domincan Republic almost everybody in Brazil is on it. They want to know why we are not using it so we are looking into it a little bit more. Like how can we make it available to staff members without having it available at every work station.
Sp [I think he said Bret or Fred?]
There is actually a Skipe to voice over IP gateway you can run that will turn those lines into church box trunks. Basically they dial in via Skipe and it basically rings in the tricks box then your tricks box routes the call through either to your auto-attendants or your extensions or however you want to handle it. There’s some pretty slick stuff you can do with it. I had my first experience with getting a Skipe out-call somebody had used it to call my house phone last week, other than the caller ID being really funky, it sounded perfect. I know a lot of our missionaries use it.
Jason
Suppose somebody has a Skipe phone in India and how does the charge occur? I don’t understand that piece of it. I’m talking over the Internet, at some point in the US, it is switching over to telephone service.
Sp
Right, on your account, I think you have to put in credits or you give them a credit card and they debit your account. It’s almost like a pay-as-you-go [Time Stamp00:51:23] cell phone.
Jason
I assume that is a lot cheaper than land-line to land-line.
Sp
Oh yeah.
Jason Lee
If you wanted a regular telephone, you could put two bonnet routers anywhere and that’s a free call and it’s a regular handset if that’s what you’re getting at.
Jason
Vonage in India.
Jason Lee
Just be sure to tell your people in India with Vonage not to dial 911. (laughter)
We were talking about routing PBX calls over voice, there are some concerns to think about related to 911 calling when you are doing that over voice traffic, we’ve had to deal with that here because we are in a Verizon territory, we have to have Verizon telephone numbers and one of our vendors wanted us with AT&T and the catch was we’d have to have a Peoria number but technically we are in Dunlap and that would screw up the whole 911 calling route, so that is one thing to keep in mind. It depends on what your state requires. The state of Illinois requires to identify the handset when the building is over 20,000 square feet, so remember that.
Serge
Anyone have a suggestion for another voice carrier besides Voice [?]
Jason Lee
I’ve got a reseller I can suggest, I’ll have to get the contact information for you. They claim they can do voice anywhere now. The guy’s name is Ryan at Bandwidth.com I can send you his contact information. They wanted to do voice trunking service. Their comparison sheet was fairly impressive, we had already contracted a PRI by the time they got there.
Sp
The major [?] are getting into offering voice termination too so you may can check with whoever may be in your area.
Jason Lee
We have a product called Flex IT and one interesting thing is if you do have AT&T as your local dial tone, you may want to look into this. With Flex [Time Stamp00:55:06] IT they are offering a deal for T1, you can get it for $250 per T1 and you can bond as many as you want but you have to do their voice long distance. We couldn’t do it because we can’t do AT&T numbers in our Verizon territory. Most of the larger carriers are doing some sort of voice solution. They also are doing a shared T1 so you can do half voice and half data or any variable in between.
Serge
What number will the India folks be dialing if they have to call your office?
Jason
I don’t know. The only thing I’ve done is contacted Dell about support in India. The phone stuff, I’ve just been doodling.
Serge
I came across a company in Europe, they do inbound voice over IP wireless, which means you could have a local member in the UK and when people call that number, if you have like an Asterick box or voice over IP, that number will be forwarded directly to your voice box, it’s called Vox.com [he is putting the name in the chat box]. It only costs about $100 a month. Right now it supports up to two but if you need more, I think they charge $2 more and you can get a trunk.
Jason
Do you have a blog yet?
Serge
Not yet, will be setting up one soon.
Jason Lee
Don’t tell them you don’t have a blog, they will hound you and hound you!
Jason
That’s great information to toss on a blog for lots of people to get ahold of.
Sp
Tony’s post the other day inspired me to start my blog and more so inspired me to find the domain name that came out of that. I now have www.blinkelights.com I’ll put it in the chat.
Jason
Email it to me.
Jason
When does Andrew get back?
Sp
I think his trip was for 2 months, I think he’s been gone half of that.
Jason Lee
Have you all had any experience with [Time Stamp01:01:11] Radware? We are still on our quest for loading balancing link to aggregation hardware and we’ve now completed our demo with F5 and now Radware, and I just wondered if anybody had experience. Dean said they didn’t have great success, but we’re hoping how we are going to make these lovely ISP work for us. I think the two leaders are the Radware and the [something else I couldn’t understand what he said, something like Fatpipe?]. The F5 is out because they are expensive and their product is the least flexible. It only comes with 4 ports, it’s just one of their small boxes stripped. So we’ve focused more on Fatpipe? And Radware. Jeremy did the demo yesterday with Radware, pleasantly surprised. Both companies are going to give us a 30-day demo. I’d never heard of them. They benchmark it on the end of load-balancing arena. I’ll blog about it a bit.
Is anybody doing any link aggregation?
Jason
We want to wait and see what you do.
Jason Lee
The hardware is more expensive than we thought it would be.
Jason
But you shouldn’t have to replace it for a long time.
Jason Lee
They both told us the life cycle on their product is 5-10 years. I think it’s not the nitch for Fatpipe [?].
Sharepoint registration ends tomorrow. Sign up!
Jason
Does it still look like 40 people?
Jason Lee
Yeah, around the 40 mark. One vendor that I know of, haven’t heard back from church management vendors. People have asked about curriculum. Don’t know a lot about that.
We were talking about the lunch menu today, looks good to me.
Jeremy
We’ve got a special menu for Jason Powell.
Dave asked for shrimp. Sorry! Good try.
Snacks sound good too.
Jason
My wife left me a voice mail. Hi, no one cares that you are in a conference, call me. It’s a standing joke to [Time Stamp01:08:57] see if anybody will comment about my message.
Tony sent an email asking if anyone has feedback on the transcripts that are being done. Is anybody looking at the transcripts? And suggestions for making them better?
I have looked back at them a couple times to do a quick search to get some information, about that Promise gear. It’s nice to have them but if nobody is utilizing them, maybe we won’t utilize them until further down the road, I don’t know.
Sp
The transcripts are very helpful if you didn’t attend the podcast but you would probably ignore them if you were actually there.
Jason
Good point.
Sp
And it is also interesting to notice how much jargon people apparently use without even realizing it because the person doing the transcription is probably not a techy even though they did an excellent job of transcribing.
Jason Lee
Margaret does an incredible job of transcribing this stuff even though she gives me a little flack about lack of a blog, but I guess she’s earned enough credit.
Jason
We appreciate it Margaret when you insert little fun things into the transcription.
[Thanks guys!! I enjoy this. I am learning a ton about IT (certainly more than I want to know J but it’s still a challenge to know what you guys are talking about sometimes…thanks for your patience]
I’m going to recommend the transcription continues. I think it will be even more valuable down the road as more people find out about it.
Bret [?]
Jason, you gave that nice plug for your voice transcription service, is that a pay service through Vonage or how does that happen?
Jason
Well Spinbox used to be free but not too long ago I went out to Spinbox to see if I could get my wife on it and it was closed. Their web age has changed again.
Sp
Do you [Time Stamp01:12:15] thinks that’s voice recognition or do they just have somebody listening to your voicemail and transcribing it?
Jason
I’ve gotta believe it’s voice recognition. Because you can speak in Spanish and it will convert it into Spanish text. It does it fast enough that I’m sure it’s some sort of voice recognition technology. It used to be so great that I never had to listen to the audio, but it seems lately that it is not as accurate as it used to be. It does a better job of the English language of putting the punctuation in than I would if I were writing this message.
Scott
I’m using Spinbox as well, I haven’t noticed that it is not accurate, but I’ve noticed that it takes a lot longer than it used to.
Jason
I agree with that. So I don’t know. Are you on the free plan?
Scott
Yes, I wonder if that’s it.
Jason
Low priority que. If you go to www.ureach.com/spinbox $9.99 a month for 40 voicemail conversations. Is that through a particular provider? It says here most are supported. 10 bucks for 40 is not so great, in my opinion. You could burn through 40 in a week or two. I’ve heard that Vonage now has a voice text feature as well. It’s just a matter of time ‘til people get this voice to text technology.
Scott
I think I asked Vonage specifically and they told me they had somebody in India transcribing the messages. So I don’t know if you want Vonage digging through your voice mail.
Sp
Doesn’t Amazon have a service like that now to where you can farm out things like now to actual humans.
Jason
Yeah, what was that called, Crowd Sourcing.
Sp
They call it Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Some famous guy got lost and they had people looking through satellite imagery to see if they could spot wreckage [Time Stamp01:16:46] of his plane. The name comes from years ago somebody made a mechanical turk, like a Turkish robot that played chess and everybody was amazed that it played a game of chess and really there was a dude inside it. Reverse automation.
Jason
If you Google crowd sourcing, you’ll find a number of things. That is where I originally started looking for transcription services. You can put out what you are looking for, like somebody to transcribe, how much, etc. You can put out a project, somebody wanted to engineer a wing on a spaceship for $100,000.
Sp
Back to your India situation. I just finished looking through some help files on my Skipe and the secret for you is to upgrade to Skipe Pro and then it flat-rates all the calls to the US. I believe it is $3 a month, however many calls they want to make, they bundle.
Jason
I’m just trying to think of what is the easiest, least amount of work for them and for us, if they’ve got a broadband connection, which they do, I don’t know how good it is.
Sp
Probably better than ours.
Jason
I know their cell phone service rocks. Just looking at their electrical grid is like insanely scary, spaghetti wires everywhere. We may try Skype. You can buy their phone and jack it straight into the router right?
Sp
Yeah, program it and plug it in anywhere. Wifi.
Jason
We are approaching an hour and a half. We will not have another podcast until, January 3rd I’m not available, are most people gonna be gone?
Sp
I will be working
Sp
I will be working
Sp
What’s a vacation?
Jason
So that’s up in there then. Either Jan 3 or Jan 17th.
Sp
I’m going to through out a question for everybody, do you guys have any blank IT plans for 2008?
Jason
Of course. I’ve got a 50 terabyte storage project that I’ve been working on for half [Time Stamp01:22:35] a year, I’ll continue to push forward. How do you manage 50 terabytes, what vendor to use, how do you back it up, how do you make it redundant, what do you archive, what is critical? It makes my head hurt talking about it.
We want to do Exchange 2007 next year. Monitoring is also huge on our plate for next year. What products? Systems Center? We’d like to replace all the switches with new HP switches instead of Dell. Those come to mind right away.
Apparently nobody else has any plans for 2008. I plan to lose more weight. Plan to get an Xbox 360, work less, play more.
We got tons of people wanting to be involved, we’re talking to Apple, we’re talking to Equal Logic, we’re talking to Data Core, Compellant, Promise, IBM, Intel, I’ll probably get Dell.
Sp
What are your requirements? What are you looking for from each of those vendors?
Jason
It would be easier for you to hit my blog. On the side, down under Categories is the san category. www.jasonpowell.net on the lower left side. Right now our gut says we’ll put all our database stuff on Equal Logic gear and all our file level stuff on Promise. If somebody gave me money right now, that’s where I would lean. I will probably say something different next time you ask me that.
Sp
Is your budget going up or staying the same?
Jason
We are in a holding place right now, but I’m saying this big chunk of money needs to be set aside for IT. the IT budget may not change from one year to the next, but here’s a project that needs its own budget, I’ve talked to the Senior Pastor, told him what will happen if we don’t make any changes and here’s where we want to be 3 years down the road, here are the steps I recommend to get us there.
Sp
Do you guys archive your media files in house or offsite?
Jason
Most [Time Stamp01:28:15] everything is here. We have one of our video guys who does everything at home. That creates a challenge.
We record every service that we do in high-def then dump it down to H264. We have 5 weekend services plus Thursday night plus they want to start recording our Jr High and Sr High service and college age services they want to start recording, which will eat up a lot of storage.
Sp
I’ve got an AV question, when you say high-def, what resolution is that?
Jason
I think it’s coming off of our imag at DVC Pro, I’m trying to remember, is it DVC 70, maybe it’s 50, then we take that crunch it down to H264, then we’ll give that to our final cut guys, we also give it to our web guys and they crunch it into Flash and upload that and that’s how we do our online streaming. At some point we are going to get high-def camera, that may change storage needs again. No end to talking about storage, and sans, and back-ups, and disaster recovery. Where’d Tony go?
I need to go. Let’s wrap up. Watch the blog for whether or not we do the January 3rd. Remember to register for Sharepoint.
The chat room will stay open, you can chat amongst yourselves.
Merry Christmas all!
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