Some Thoughts On Mothers’ Day

It is Mothers’ Day, you can see restaurants, kopi tiams etc all packed for this occasion. It is great to celebrate your Mum’s care and love for you and to give her a treat on Mothers’ Day. Just a feeling that every day should be Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, we should love and care for our parents, every day and not such on a Mother’s or Father’s Day.

Spammer Attacks

We had some inquiries from customers who had their free emails compromised and used to blast emails of a scam or spam nature. For such cases, what we suspected was that the computers was compromised with the passwords stolen. Changing the passwords would be of little use because the hackers can access the new passwords. What we suggest is a thorough cleaning of the viruses and trojans of your computers. It may also be better to get a technician to double ensure that your system is clean.

Web Designers

Met a copy of extremely professional web designers. One of my customer’s web designer went away without telling him, uncontactable and remove the web site he designed. Poor customer was without a web site. It was with luck that we met a few extremely helpful web designers who design and upload my customer’s web site over the weekend and on Monday we have a brand new and great looking web site!

Anti Virus

For those who has installed anti virus in their system, do not think that just installing is securing your systems. You should have regular updates as well as the basic precautions not to click on suspicious files. Anti Virus is just the most basic form of security and a lot of people think that with anti virus, they are immune, which is far from the case.

Migrating of your Data Room

It is often extremely complicated to maintain a data room in your office for your racks. This is especially so for those in industrial building where there are frequent maintenance of power supply. Also it is often not cost effective to have the FM200, UPS etc maintenance for only a few racks. Let 8 to Infinity Pte Ltd settle this issue for you by outsourcing the entire racks to us. We will assist in the moving to our data center and also plan out the setup as well as the redundancy etc. Your IT dept can then concentrate on my important tasks at hand and you will end up saving a bundle too!

Happy Vesak Day 2012

Vesak Day

Vesak Day

8 to Infinity would like to wish all Buddhists in Singapore a Happy Vesak Day! Vesak Day or informally known as Buddha’s Birthday encompasses the birth, enlightenment, and passing away of Gautama Buddha. This is a special day of bring happiness to the rest. I would have a simple wish, wishing all Singaporeans, whatever religion or race a Great and Happy Day! We have to count our blessings, we Singaporeans are so blessed to have all races and religions living in harmony with each other.

 



2 TB Drives Raid 6

Using 2 TB drives for Raid 6, was a bit uncertain, if there is any problem rebuilding will take quite sometime for such large hard disks. I would prefer if customers can estimate their usage and get the more standard and easier to maintain hard disks should any problem occur.



Colocation is not just about Space

We receive a lot of inquiries from potential users about our colocation services. Colocation basically means providing the rack space, the bandwidth and the Power. Therefore it is not just about 1 U, 2 U etc, it is also about the bandwidth usage and the power supply. Power is actually of prime considerations as the more power a server needs, the more heat it generated and therefore the more costly it will be. Therefore there is a limitations on the number of power sockets allocated. Similarly for bandwidth, there are shared and dedicated bandwidth. For shared we have to impose a cap so as to prevent the pipe being saturated by one user causing problems for the rest of the users in that pipe. For dedicated bandwidth it is different as you pay for the fixed amount of bandwidth for eg 10 mbps, 20 mbps etc.

This cooling is really COOL!



Cooling is extremely important for tropical countries like Singapore. Imagine an entire building of servers without cooling system, the heat will be tremendous. Cost is estimated to be half of what you need to power your equipment, therefore each server you put in, basically you need to cater for 1.5x the power usage of the server. It is always a challenge implementing better cooling systems. Some took the easy way for instance Facebook using nature’s help. Facebook’s new datacenter near the Artic Circle at Lulea is a great example. You do not need cooling there but you definitely need heating!



May Day May Day

May Day was a hard day for us. One of the customers server go down at this time. We managed to go on site to troubleshoot, but the situation isn’t easy. It seems that the Operating System is corrupted. Best to get a technician to build another server and port the data over so as to ensure that the data remains intact. But it is holiday time and we used up all our server spares yesterday, that caused a lot of extra work. Returning back to office after more than 8 hours at the datacenter.

May Day

May Day the 1st May is also Singapore’s Labor Day. It is also the International Worker’s Day with more than 80 countries celebrating with us. It is also a time for us to thank our workers for their hard work and dedication.

Vicious Cycle Singapore Web Hosting

To be frank, a normal web site seldom exceed 2 mb. Previously we see hosting about 10 mb, then competition on who offers more sees 10 mb becoming 100 mb, 100 mb becoming 1000 mb, 1 GB becoming 10 GB, we are now looking at such hosters who are selling 100s GB with maybe only 1 server of 1 TB. This is really mass overselling. It just take 1 customer to fill up your server and at the prices they are charging, they are 100% making a loss. Also how do you assure of good support with basically cents a day as income? The vicious cycle is set, but soon I am sure rationale will return and we will see better pricing and better support and less competition on web space and more competition on reliability.

Urgent Network Maintenance – Western Datacenter

This notification is to inform you that we are conducting an URGENT network maintenance to your servers’ co location network during the following interval.

Date : 01/05/2012 Tuesday

Time : 00:30 – 01:00 SGT (GMT+8:00)

Reason : Urgent Network Maintenance

Impact : Intermittent connection outage during maintenance window

Action : No action needed

Accounting Dedicated Server

Do you have an application such as accounting software that needs to be accessed by a few offices distributed all over the world? One of the ways is to have secured connections to a central server. 8 to Infinity can provide for such a solution. We can setup the server, help in the installation of the software and also install the necessary firewall. From there on you can access your accounting software where-ever you are.

Google Drive is Out!

Google has always given the world extremely innovative products. Gmail initially at the invitation basis, everyone was asking for an invite. Google Drive does not seem to have much hype but since it is from Google, I feel it is sure to revolutionize the market.

Though we are not into providing online storage, but we are also reading into the market to see how it is going to affect us. Google is too big, too innovative and too full of money :) . I guess the hardest hit will be those providing online storage space. It is always tough competing against Google and I think even Microsoft will agree with that statement :)