Mike Frost

Author's details

Name: Mike Frost
Date registered: March 15, 2012

Latest posts

  1. Monitoring — August 21, 2013
  2. Improving Blackboard — May 23, 2013
  3. Power outages — March 13, 2013
  4. Interesting Statistics — March 8, 2013

Most commented posts

  1. Improving Blackboard — 1 comment

Author's posts listings

Aug 21

Monitoring

With over 1000 servers and almost as many switches and other pieces of routing equipment across the university, one of the most important things is to make sure that everything is working as expected. There are many approaches we could take towards monitoring the services we run, from mostly manual to entirely automated. To save on …

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May 23

Improving Blackboard

A few people may have noticed a short period last week when Blackboard was unavailable / unstable. We noticed a problem with the database server and have been working over the past week to work out what the problem is and how to fix it! We’ll start with the structure of Blackboard – there are …

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Mar 13

Power outages

It appears this morning that there have been a series of power cuts affecting large parts of Southampton, including various University campuses. Estates have had an army of electricians restoring power to buildings, and iSolutions have been bringing up our switches and networking equipment as soon as we can. Phones and networking equipment have been …

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Mar 08

Interesting Statistics

To start us off then, here are some interesting statistics that we recently gathered: Our data centre holds around 1500 servers, over half of which are virtual machines. Our primary filestore cluster holds over 126TB of data, of which 90TB is user files, 27TB is shared/resource data, and 7TB is backups. On an average week, …

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