Panduit Blanking Curtain

Panduit dropped off a new toy... err tool today.  It's a sample of their new blanking curtain.  Instead of a slew of 1U or so panels to attach to a rack, it's 4U that expands up to 45U.  Of course it only works if you are blanking contiguous areas.

It was a breeze to install and it is supposed to work in both square and round hole racks.  Changing the size as you add servers to the bottom of the rack is a tool less 10 second procedure.  All in all, I think it's a great new product for data center air containment.

Installed!

Deployed!

How to Explain "the Cloud" to a Non-Techie

Tonight my cousin called me to ask for help with his business computing class.  The topic was the cloud or blah blah cloud.  He wanted to know what exactly the cloud is.

This really got me thinking.  I work with both private and public clouds daily in my personal life and career, but I couldn't at first define what exactly a cloud was in non-technical terms.

The best analogy I came up with was an apartment complex.  Renters don't need the space or resources of a whole house.  But the landlord could take on the infrastructure (ie the structure, plumbing, electrical) and the maintenance and rent units of housing to the renters.  

Anyone have a better way of explaining it?  How about the differences between public, private and hybrid clouds?  

Update... or Did Ben Fall Off the Face of the Earth?

I haven't written much since June 2013.  The first few months I can blame on a project at work.  I finally got approval to replace the aging Rolm phone system at the hospital with a shiny new Cisco phone system.  After months of planning, training and worrying we went live November 1st.  Being that the old system couldn't support a T1 to bridge to the new system, we did the cut over as a flash cut having staged the phones earlier in the week.  Overall things went well except for under estimating how long 400+ analog lines take to move and a glitch with the telco.

After the phone project had settled down, I turned back to taking care of my family.  My wife, dogs and I had been rather unhappy for some time in our current house and town.  So that led me to put out my resume and find a new job. 

This spring I changed jobs to a multi-state hospital system headquartered in the next town down on the Interstate.  It's been a great career move and I'm getting to work with a lot of technology that I would never have had access to in my previous position (UCS, Nexus, OTV, and others).  Unfortunately the house has been harder to sell than we thought, but we're hopeful that by next year that too will pass and we'll be moved down the road.

So now my plans for the rest of the year.

1. Pass TSHOOT before the exam changes.
2. Dive deep into datacenter technologies.
3. Figure out ways to make my commute productive time.