Comments for Piers Daniell

Comment on I am watching the NOC grow by admin

admin — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 14:10:28 +0000

For this install we are using LifeSize and their passport system. However you can get similar solutions from Cisco and Polycom. We work with lots of video partners so let me know if you want me to put you in touch with some of them.

Comment on I am watching the NOC grow by Kevin Christoforou

Kevin Christoforou — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 09:17:22 +0000

I think that is a very good idea.

Do you mind me asking what hardware / software you use for the video conferencing?

Comment on Last to the party….. again. by admin

admin — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 09:42:40 +0000

Issues we have experienced Mark relate especially to the Cisco 800 series router. With the 877-M and 887-M (using 4.0.18 firmware) the line will only get sync at < 2 KM but drops sync regularly. On a long line length it wont sync up at all with auto-negotiation and needs to be coded on the ATM interface. Problem is if the line wont support Annex-M it doesn’t sync making support near impossible.

Comment on Last to the party….. again. by admin

admin — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 09:35:49 +0000

Not at all Simon - BT will be more expensive than the BE network because to offer meaningful bandwidth limits on their network costs a bomb. But of course if you are happy with a contended capped product it would be cheaper!

Comment on Last to the party….. again. by Simon Morley

Simon Morley — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 12:00:53 +0000

Worried that their service costs might interfere with your pricing structure at all Piers?

Comment on Last to the party….. again. by MarkJ (ISP Review UK)

MarkJ (ISP Review UK) — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 07:42:29 +0000

What kind of problems do you have with the Cisco and Annex M BT service Piers? Not being able to work with Cisco kit is quite a big problem for a sizeable number of UK SME businesses, more than a few of which cannot get an unbundled alternative from BE. Interested to know more.

Mark - ISPr’s Editor

Comment on The best show on earth by admin

admin — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 20:20:53 +0000

Yeah there were rumours of Clarkson not doing it for much longer. It is nice comfort TV though… and a bit of common sense for the odd petrol lover.

Comment on The best show on earth by Jim

Jim — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 19:13:43 +0000

I went to the 1st episode of this season’s filming and if you go a bit early then they tend to be just finishing up.

Good series, shame it’s so overly scripted though, getting a bit too predictable; but it pleases the masses I guess.

Comment on Practice what you preach by Chris Baron

Chris Baron — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 21:25:40 +0000

Cloud computing is great if you’re a small organisation and only need “standard” security. If you’re a medium size organisation and need higher security it’s not quite there yet.

ESX is a fabulous product and we use it for all our servers. It’s a solid product, has great features like load balancing and high availability and with everything being virtual it’s great for DR. I’d have no hesitation in recommending it to anybody for a virtual server infrastructure.

Sadly, however it’s not cheap, so if you’re a medium size organisation (were 200+) you need a lot of ESX servers and that gets very expensive. It would cost me a lot more to go virtual than to give everybody a decent desktop.

Secondly, if you need to be secure and use token login (we use aladdin tokens) it’s just not there yet. The virtual environment just isn’t as secure as a physical world for all sorts of reasons. Perhaps the governments own initiatives like g-cloud will help to drive solutions to market, but if it doesn’t then such initiatives risk failing to comply with their own SPF mandated security requirements.

I’m sure in time the problems will be solved, and I can’t wait for that day. Unless costs drop significantly I wouldn’t virtualise all desktops, but having a proportion virtualised would solve so many issues it would be worth the extra investment. Sadly, until that day arrives I need to keep investing my team’s time looking at emerging options which are usually cost prohibitive and suffer from the same security problems.

Comment on What is the point in Google installing fibre? by admin

admin — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 11:02:23 +0000

That does look like a quick line! To be honest though we have 1 Gb/s fibre in the office and apart from downloading stuff quickly, surfing the web isn’t much quicker. Sure the new advances in TV will make bandwidth more of an issue but I still don’t think it is a good move for Google which wont be making the same returns from fibre investment.