Meeting Tonight, Apple, De Anza Three,

Thu Apr 20 03:33:02 PDT 2006

  I just thought that considering we've had so many BayLISA events lately in 
  addition to our regular general meeting, that people might like a reminder
  where the heck it is this time.

  We're at:
	Apple
	Cupertino
	De Anza Three

  That's the parking lot on the East side of DeAnza just South of that big 
  street that leads into the Loop (Marianni at the light).  

  If you're coming from 280 then you're coming from the north, and the
  easiest is to turn on Marianni, then turn right into the Blue Apples lot
  ...then, go around the building to the other side, since otherwise it's a
     long walk around the building.
  ...try not to go too far, it's a real PITA to have to U-turn by the Donut 
     Wheel.  Unless you were getting donuts or coffee anyway :)

  If you're coming from 85 or otherwise by surface street (DeAnza/Stevens
  Creek being a giant intersection if you're indulging in paper maps) then 
  don't bother going as far as Marianni;  just continue North, and turn into 
  the earliest Blue Apple parking lot you see past the Donut Wheel.
  ...That's the right side of the street, and the right side of the building.
  ...if you miss, turn R on Marianni, use its entrance to the Blue Apples
     and continue back around the building.

Items to think about: 
  You can think of this as the gedanken edition of short but cool;  share
  your thoughts ahead, or bring 'em to the meeting :)

  Given that the topic is the infrastructure needed to plan using
  virtualization effectively - where do you keep the disks?  Sure,
  we just had NetApps talking lately, but even using it at a smaller
  scale needs something, and you might want to split up the usage anyway.
  Think about smaller shared mass-storage, maybe in the 5TB range or so?
  How many people have been bit by ...or served really well by... devices in
  this range?  RAID's nice for getting lots of disk at once - keeping a RAID
  *healthy* is a bit more than just waiting for it to beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep
  (in your monitor software or email, unless maybe you enjoy the chill and
  live in the NOC ;> ) that one of its disks blew out... and of course,
  that's no defense for some doofus piece of code slowly corrupting a nice
  big project or database, so you need a longterm backup plan;  restoring
  machines in a virtualized trice is easy if you've got a stack of Known
  Good Systems pre-imaged and kept online.

Have fun, don't let too much fun have you during the day, and I'll be seeing 
you at BayLISA for the Third Thursday general meeting!

-* Heather Stern * BayLISA Board Member * http://www.baylisa.org/ *-