Redux Blog All Posts by Thomas Brenneke

Lead Datacenter Engineer, Cameron Smith

(April 01, 2013, Posted in General News by Thomas Brenneke)

Behind the curtains at Network Redux, our infrastructure team ensure that our physical components are online for our clients 24/7/365.  This requires an array of talents, and we’re fortunate to have a phenomenal team lead, Cameron Smith.  As our Lead Datacenter Engineer Cameron’s team have eyes and ears into every physical component under the hood.

With that said, we thought you may like to get to know Cameron a bit better, both on a personal and professional level.

Cat or Dog?

I love all Animals. I have a 13 year old cat named Sashimi that looks like a panther and will probably get a dog when I have some room.

Portland or Seattle?

Portland (but we have some awesome toys in Seattle). I love the people here it is just the right size city in that it is large enough to have culture but small enough to still be friendly.

110 or 208?

208 and 8-10kW per rack actual draw.

Chassis or Stacked?

Chassis as a cluster node because we love High Availability.

Beer or Wine?

Very dark beer. Actually I love a wide variety of beer and living in Portland we have it good as there are many world class brewers here.

Dell or HP?

Dell kicks HP in the pants! I am hands on with both day in and day out and Dell chassis are rock solid.

Can you tell us about your role as the Lead Datacenter Engineer at Network Redux?

I am in charge of the installation and management of all physical infrastructure at the hardware level for Network Redux. I architect our space usage, all physical deployment, racking, cabling and power efficiency. I love to make the most out of what we have and do it not just to industry standards but to our standards.

You led an internal project to implement Dell Open Manage Essentials across our network, can you tell us a bit about this?

For years we had a reactive approach to hardware health. We did daily walk throughs of our multiple data centers and looked for amber lights. As our infrastructure grew and we moved away from traditional hosting into enterprise managed hosting I needed better visibility into our hardware health and a better way to manage it’s maintenance.

We needed a proactive approach and I chose Dell Open Manage Essentials. We are close to being 100% Dell for our servers and there were many perks to choosing this app over other off the shelf products or building our own IPMI 2.0 management tool.

All of our servers have Dell’s out of band on board card called DRAC and OME integrates directly with the DRAC cards allowing us to have a central point to have an in depth view into all the components in all of our servers. Not only do we have the ability to immediately access a complete inventory of all the parts in all our servers down to the part number and even MAC addresses of ports we now immediately know if a part is in warning or critical status. I have also connected these alert notifications that we receive in OME to our central NOC so our team can address issues 24/7/365.

The icing on the cake for me is how OME handles firmware updates on the remote servers.

We are able to see what servers have new firmware available as OME connects to Dell’s site for the latest releases. I am able to select what updates I want to apply and when and OME handles downloading the firmware files and running the remote updates all automatically. This helps dramatically if there is a critical update or if I want to bring a server up to the latest after it has been in a production run.

You’ve been known for stunning cable management and incredible visual diagrams, where do these skills originate?

I am an artist at heart and was a graphic designer in a past life so the making the things I work with look nice comes naturally for me but there is more to it than that. Regarding cable management we have to keep it organized due to the shear volume of cabling. Some of our private cloud chassis have 12 cat cables each with 3 or 4 nodes. That’s 36 to 48 cables for just one small build running to the network chassis. As our cabling bundles grew and our level of client changed I needed to keep in mind that improperly cabled runs could lead to data degradation due to near-end crosstalk. We use cat 6 exclusively but our bundles can grow quite large as we are now filling 50U cabinets top to bottom with servers so I made sure my design was allowing for those thresholds and I also changed our power routes to reduce contamination.

Your work includes a great deal of forecasting for growth while maintaining incredibly efficient usage rates.  In this effort what trends are you seeing in the datacenter industry which could be considered game changers?

I am noticing changes that are affecting many parts of the industry. Today we are able to do so much more with so much less hardware that it is changing the way data centers are being used. Hosted private clouds are now becoming standard for business growth. Larger public clouds and big data deployments are springing up everywhere so even though we need less hardware to to the same work there is much more work to do. There is just so much explosive growth that data centers are thriving but I see many newcomers to the data center market as well as old school points of view that are getting left behind in this flood as the needs of the clients change very quickly and the agile are able to change with them.

Other changes I am seeing are modifications in how data centers are offering services to large colo clients. They are offering different billing models for power and space to make the deal that much sweeter allowing clients to reduce their overhead and more quickly move up in power and space usage as they don’t have to bite off more than they can chew. If a company can spend those extra dollars these days on marketing or an extra body rather than wasted space or power drops everybody goes home happy.

YEC Partnership

(September 26, 2012, Posted in General News by Thomas Brenneke)

Our Enterprise Virtual Servers (EVS) reside on commercial grade equipment in a high availability cluster so you are not device dependent. Our HA system will detect when a physical chassis has failed and will automatically move VM's that were living on that chassis, to another host.  Our EVS line is completely managed by our team of Engineers, therefore we handle the installation, migration, configuration and optimization of your platform.  You also have the option of pre-configured stacks, such as our Drupal Platform, for optimal performance.  Phone support is included and you would have access to our NOC line, which is staffed 24/7/365.  
 
Enterprise Virtual Sever – EVS0
(1) 2.8Ghz CPU Core
1GB Memory
12GB SAN Storage
 
Monthly Recurring Charge:  $99
Less YEC Discount 10%:     $89
 
Enterprise Virtual Server – EVS1
(1) 2.8Ghz CPU Core
2GB Memory
24GB SAN Storage
 
Monthly Recurring Charge:  $199
Less YEC Discount 10%:     $179
 
Enterprise Virtual Server – EVS2
(2) 2.8Ghz CPU Core
4GB Memory
24GB SAN Storage
 
Monthly Recurring Charge:  $399
Less YEC Discount 10%:     $359
 
*No additional setup fees
*Month to month program
 
For more details, please contact sales@networkredux.com or call 800 756 6518

Job Opening: Technical Project Manager (Portland)

(August 23, 2012, Posted in General News by Thomas Brenneke)

Title:   Technical Project Manager

Location:  Portland, Oregon

Type:  Full Time

Job Summary

This full-time position is responsible for managing new and existing projects related to client deployments, installations and maintenance.  The technical project manager will be engaged with both Managed web hosting clients and our team of system engineers, bridging the gap to ensure excellent levels of product quality and customer experience.

Given the technical nature of this position, those applying should have appropriate backgrounds in technical infrastructure related to web hosting, managed services, professional services, datacenter operations as it pertains to Project Management.

Job Responsibilities

• Design and implement a project management life cycle that the organization will adhere to.
• Initiate, plan and monitor a client acquisition life cycle from completion of sale to ongoing maintenance of client account.
• Coordinate appropriate technical resources to complete projects in a timely manner.
• Interface with clients to ensure a focused line of communication during project life cycle.
• Monitoring health of active projects.
• Prepare and deliver internal (engineering) and external (client) reports.

Experience

4+ years of Technical Project Management experience.

Please send all resumes to join@networkredux.com

Thank you!

New Relic Launches App Speed Index and Custom Dashboards

(June 26, 2012, Posted in General News by Thomas Brenneke)

Our fantastic partner New Relic has some exciting news to share with our clients.

This is a guest blog post written and contributed by Bill Hodak, Director of Product Marketing at New Relic, an application performance management vendor and Network Reduxpartner.

New Relic is announcing the availability of two awesome new features. Thanks to our SaaS model, our customers have immediate access to these new features. When you login or sign up today, you’ll get one or both of these features.

New Relic and Network Redux have partnered to make New Relic Standard available to all Network Redux customers free of charge. If you’re not yet a customer, sign up today! All accounts start with 14 days of Pro, for free.

App Speed Index

Think your app is fast? Stop guessing and start knowing with the App Speed Index. The App Speed Index leverages our Big Data to provide Big Insight to our customers. New Relic collects over 55 billion performance metrics and monitors 1.5 billion page loads on behalf of our 25,000 customers and their 450,000 application instances. All of that data equates to 3.5 terabytes of new data collected, stored and analyzed each day.

With the App Speed Index, our customers will be able to classify their application into a Peer Group of similar applications (ex. eCommerce, SaaS, Gaming, and Consumer Internet applications) and benchmark their app with industry peers. Find out your percentile rank within your peer group for end user and application response times, error rates, and application availability to find out how fast you really are.

Learn more about the App Speed Index here, or check out this blog post. And don’t forget to check out our living infographic, updated daily to showhowthe peer groups rank by performance and availability. It even lists the fastest applications monitored by New Relic!

Custom Dashboards

Have you ever wanted to see Network I/O graphs and End User Response Time graphs on the same dashboard?  What about some custom business metrics and application response time? Now you can with Custom Dashboards. With Custom Dashboards you can build any dashboard with any data that tickles your fancy. The best part about it? No Coding Required!  With Custom Dashboards all you have to do is click and pick, drag and drop, or instant copy an existing New Relic graph and boom — you’ve got a Custom Dashboard. This feature is only available to our Pro customers. So if you’re not currently a Pro customer, sign upor upgrade today to get access to Custom Dashboards. Learn more about Custom Dashboards by reading this blog post.

Scaling a business, lessons learned from the bunkers

(June 20, 2012, Posted in General News by Thomas Brenneke)

The recent press coverage is gathering our small company quite a bit of attention, including being mentioned in an internal Dell morning email that reaches every employee at Dell.