Month: November 2014

Small Business Saturday 2014 in the UK

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On December 6th 2014, it will be Small Business Saturday in the UK.

Small business day is a non-profit, non-commercial and non-political campaign to promote small businesses in the UK. A post of this on the Telegraph website from last year shows how much we need small businesses in the UK and explains why we need Small Business Saturday. Last year this helped to generate millions in the UK for small businesses.

There is a website which is dedicated to this that explains everything you need to know about connecting, getting involved and further information at https://smallbusinesssaturdayuk.com/

You can also interact with many people who are supporting Small Business Saturday by logging into Facebook and following the Small Business Saturday page.

If you are a Twitter user, you can follow them on their Twitter Page

Of course there are many other links on the internet about this, but it is important to stress that small businesses in the UK need support for the economy to flourish.

I for one will be getting involved with this, so show your support for small businesses and lets make the business world a better place.

This entry was posted in Business.

Its been a busy time with IT Implementations

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I have been busy over the last month doing a lot of work for different companies in the UK. This work is helping business along their challenging path to implement successful IT solutions. Here is a list of some of stuff I have been doing:

  • Installation of Dell Equallogic Storage system and implementing into a brand new Windows 2012 R2 Hyper-V Cluster
  • Installation of 6 Kemp Load Balanced and Geo clusters to provide a UK Load Balanced solution for Microsoft Exchange 2013
  • Migration of an old Exchange 2007 platform into Office 365 Mid Size business plan.
  • Implementing upstream and downstream WSUS deployments

This has been exiting work really and I really enjoy working with this IT sector. I have managed to deploy the Kemp solution quite easy after having a vast background with Citrix Netscaler. Although the products are different to each other in terms of service offering, the Kemp provides a standard load balancing feature that is easy to implement and works very well with Microsoft Solutions.

I have also been brushing up on my Dell storage knowledge now version 7 of the Equallogic software is out. Working in many different Hypervisor environments, this solution was easy to implement and migrate from an old SAN and Hyper-V cluster. This counts towards a large disaster IT infrastructure for small businesses. This is something I have used for my business and something I plan to stick with. I also recommend other companies to move into this if possible and carry out their migrations for them.

In terms of Microsoft core services that are offered within the Windows Server 2012 R2 platform, I have had a lot of experience with Hyper-V, RDS, VDI, Failover Clustering, File and Print Services and WSUS. WSUS is a tool which is very good if you want to distribute patches and software updates from Microsoft to your servers. If you have a slow internet connection or are restricted in terms of contention or even download capacity, you can use WSUS to download once and then distribute to many internally. I have had to do this, because the company I work with only has a limited MPLS connection which has limited bandwidth, so I enabled this as an upstream and downstream service.

Now its time to plan for next year, and I am always on the lookout for other work in all these areas.

This entry was posted in Technology.