Archive for the ‘IT infrastructure’ Category

  • 22 Mar

    Posted by
    boonteck


    Category

    POSLavu – iPad Point of Sale System – Singapore

    0

    Kidotech has been appointed the Singapore reseller for POSLavu – a really cool and flexible iPad POS system.

    All you need for a POS is an iPad, printer and a cash drawer.

    POSLavu has been specially designed for retail & restaurant , a simple affordable wireless point of sale system that can grow with your business.

    so get in touch with us at poslavu  { at } kidotech.com today!

     

    How does it work?

    POSLavu - Wireless POS for retail

    POSLavu - How does it work?

     

    Edit: Works on iPad2 too!

     

  • 23 Dec

    Posted by
    boonteck


    Category

    Archive post: Homebrew ESXi + Openfiler iSCSI

    0

     

    finally got our home (office) brewed storage (openfiler iscsi) into the datacentre, to maximise the dell r805 server.
    Decent specs: HP DL380G3
    • 2 x 3.2ghz xeon
    • 12 gb ram (yes, i know, overkill)
    • 6 x scsi 73gb (1 x ESXi installation, 5 x raid 5)
    Dell R805 server, nice specs for ESXi server, but the local storage is limited.
    • 2 x sas (put them in raid 1, and it’s 136gb max)
    with openfiler hooked into it ( 2 x cat6 cross cable), the additional 256gb makes it much more flexible. (8 cpu cores, 8gb ram (upgradable to 32gb))

    observations:

    we had a guest win2k3 std server (running mssql 2k), it was reporting high cpu usage, periodically.
    once the shared storage went in, the cpu % has been more normal.
    it is likely due to low harddisk (for esxi swap) and overall memory used. (more memory needed = more swaps = more cpu usage)

     

  • 23 Dec

    Posted by
    boonteck


    Category

    Archive post: Cheap and quiet solution for a test/local network ESXi Server

    0

    was reading the article:  ”Cheap and quiet solution for a home-based ESX Server” [url]

    gonna give my props to HP workstation xw4000; we have gotten 3 units.

    • 4GB ram
    • intel core 2 duo (6300 @ 1.8ghz)
    • 4 x sata drives
    • 1 x Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5755 Gigabit (onboard)
    • dual head nvidia quadro
    • Win XP Pro

    ESXi 3.5 U2/ Openfiler v2.3 installs out of the box.  for a low cheap price of < S$600.

    and it runs so quiet….

    We have ESXi running on one of the machines, another one is running XP Pro (with VM Workstation, running a virtualised copy of Domain controller (win2k server). 3rd machine is a standby machine for a client’s project (part of support/ maintenance)

    and coming soon, an external esxi + openfiler machine, to look up to the ESXi server as shared storage.

  • 23 Dec

    Posted by
    boonteck


    Category

    Archive Post: Virtualisation for SMEs

    0

    We have been pushing virtualisation within kidotech, for testing as well as production servers.

    Our first production server was the dell R805, a nicely spec-ed server with dual amd quadcore processors and space for plenty of ram, main drawback is the lack of local storage (2 x SAS drives) (we maxed those out, at 2 x 147GB (raid 1), and have been running 5 VMs on it.

    1 x MSSQL2000 (win2k3 server)

    4 x CentOS 5.2 (apache/ tomcat 6)

     

    performance-wise, no complains; administration is also a breeze, the ability to clone and deploy (a standard image), console access via VI Client.

    we have now reached the local storage limit, now looking for options as shared storage (NAS, SAN)

    got a pair of HP xw4000 workstations (ESXi works out of the box) in the office to experiment with shared storage.

    looking at openfiler/ freenas and a simple implementation of directly connecting the storage via a ethernet cross-cable.