Taking the NE Colorado lab to the Cloud

July 15, 2013 John Obeto

Well, the cloud is upon us.

As a result I have embarked on a reengineering project to modernize and improve the infrastructure here in our NE Colorado LogikLabs, which is maintained by me.

While I will continue to draw upon both equipment and human Logikworx resources, I will attempt to use the redone lab to help me divine our cloud directions going forward.

So far, I am leaning towards using offerings from the two strategic partners that we have, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard.

I intend to use Windows Azure as our primary cloud offering, both internally and for our clients. The HP Cloud, which has also been shortlisted from our initial testing, will be the capable number two.

Rod & Co will continue to test Azure & HP Cloud from California.

Currently, the systems here, spread over two locations separated by four miles are:

(2) HP Proliant ML350 G7 servers
(1) HP Proliant ML110 G6 server
(1) HP BladeSystem C3000 with the following blades:
- (1) HP Proliant BL460c G6 blade server
- (1) dual-socket HP Proliant BL2x220c G5 blade server
- (2) Proliant BL490c G6 blade servers
- (1) Proliant SB40c storage blade
- (1) Proliant 448 Ultrium tape blade

I also have a couple of Drobo boxes, and a DAT drive for backup.

Network switching will also be upgraded to HP Networking.

We will be employing the use of several client PCs, laptops, and Windows tablets.

While powerful enough, I believe I will need both newer, and more powerful equipment in order to accomplish this task.

With that thought in mind, I have requested several new servers which I will insert into the test environment.

This past week, several pieces of the requested equipment have shown up, and I will post a ‘Shiny New Thing’ blog on each of them, before going on to the OOBE, if needed.

Due to space constraints, and a need to keep the servers close, helping the test be more dynamic, I have requested an HP Proliant S10614 14U rack, which can be safely – for me, from Wifey – slotted into my test environment.

Software-wise, the server OS will be Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview with Windows Server 2012 as the baseline OS. A mixture of Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 Preview clients will be used. As the Preview Oss RTM, we will use the v8.1 software, retiring the 8.0 versions within a short intro period.

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