It's been a while...

I'm still here. I just got back from London. Some restructuring is going on in that office and a few folks migrated over to a new company. Most of the IT guys went so I had to go over there and have a look. It was a nice trip first time in that office and in London. The goal is to bring that office more in line with the New York HQ on all levels. What else have I been up to since April? Well LOTS! So much that I can't even remember. Our Hong Kong office office moved to a bigger space in the same building and we had to move our MPLS line that I talked about in April. The line was finally brought up last week. It takes months to move international circuits. If you ever have to do anything like that make sure you plan around that. Don't expect the line to be moved over night from the time you request it. I've had some SAN issues after my April post. One drive showed up as dead which was fine normal. They shipped us a new drive no problem. The drive comes and I swap it and the SAN still thinks no drive is in the bay. WHAT! I call Dell/emc support they send a new drive same deal. WOW! WTF! Then they want me to pull SP collects. Done they nothing. Now they want to webex in to run a tool and dig deeper. problems found. Another disk is bad but not showing up in Navi and I had to replace that disk as well. That two bad disk at the same time. I forgot exactly what we did but the process was long and took days b/c we had to put in a new disk into the slot where the ghosted bad disk was (the disk that was bad on the back end) and wait for it to transition. That's a day gone. The next day after the transition we had to go back to the original bad disk and swap that out and wait for transition, another day down. On the third day which was actually the forth day not included was the first day the original call was placed. On the Thursday the transitioning was done and all was well again. Four days to address drive problems. But I got to tell you this, NO user complained and there was NO down time. Gotta love EMC! Internet slowness. Out users are just consuming bandwidth at an alarming rate here. Even with Websense to block sites and protocols there still isn't enough. Then again we do only have 3mb to the internet at the NY HQ. But I did get a 12mb DS3 installed at the 42nd st office we are supposed to be moving to that we have not moved to yet. So in the mean time I will be routing internet traffic for the users over that 12mb line and keeping my servers and public IP's here at the main office. This is b/c all of our public IP's are tied to our circuits here in the HQ and we can't afford the downtime to move the block of IP's to the other office. Even though Verizon says it take 5 minutes. Yeah right! Something will break and everyone will be on my a$$ b/c there is down time and something isn't working, like emails. We've also installed and rolled out Microsoft's Office Communication Server (OCS). Now all our users have IM. Microsoft has a really nice product. There plan is to make OCS and Exchange into a VoIP solution. I saw a demo and it looked promising. So of course I came back to the office and upgraded to R2 and attempted to connect the OCS server to our Cisco call manager. I was fine right up until I was supposed to active the truck line and decided not to. The last thing I want is to bring down our phone system. So I put that project on hold until someone with more experience is available. I've contacted some of our vendors and they don't even know how to do it. There are more stuff but I leave it at this for now.