Here's a summary of the last few weeks:
- ice
- snow
- rain
- ice
- snow
- rain
Do you see a pattern?
From January 4 – 25, I participated in a 21-day "Daniel Fast" along with the large majority of the staff at my Church – lifechurch.tv. This was a time of "resetting / rebooting" for many of our staff. We have the privilege of serving a world-wide community of people who have either already stepped over the line of faith, and of course those that think we're totally weird. For me, personally, the Daniel Fast was a time of reflection on 2009 and anticipation of 2010 – includng my three words.
For those of you that like to keep me accountable on my "read" word for 2010, my reading list for January 2010 has been:
- The Servant by James Hunter – finished and currently in a staff bookstudy
- Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey (still have about 100 pages to go)
- First Break all the Rules by Marcus Buckingham – finished
- Good to Great by Jim Collins (an annual read for me) – finished
About 10 days ago, I flew to our home office in Oklahoma with Greg Kamer with The Mirazon Group. They, Mirazon, are our partner of choice when working on deep Microsoft, Virtualization and Storage technologies. I've personally engaged with them for some very large "forklift" migrations, a lot of brain share, and even a few smaller licensing opportunities.
For this project, Greg & I worked with one of "my guys" – Mark Burleson – to build a MIcrosoft Search Server environment. We have a large file server, and initially are indexing just over 1TB of data. Soon, maybe if I can be convinced, we'll index our "users share" also – adding another couple TB of data to the mix. The project has been great, and we had a great chance to provide a "search" tool for both our PC and Mac user groups. I look forward to rolling this out to our staff very soon.
While working on Search, we spent a lot of time talking about Sharepoint and what all that can offer to us as a staff. We also spent a lot of time discussing a large Wireless project – and have been totally blown away by technologies from Ruckus Wireless. I'm sure you've noticed I'm a HUGE Cisco Evangelist. I've been using Cisco products for well over a decade – closer to 15 years – and am fairly biased towards them. I'm a "right tool for the job" kinda guy, but really believe in Cisco. For this particular project, I've been pleasantly surprised and excited about the Ruckus gear. I'm looking forward to learning more.
Oklahoma was fun, but we also got stuck for a few days. Our flights out of Oklahoma were canceled Thursday, Friday and Saturday (we left Sunday) because of a giant ice / snow storm that effectively shut down the Oklahoma City region. The bad news is that we really missed our family. The good news is that we had a chance to work on some other random projects like:
- Provisioning a Cisco 6503-E, and aggregating it to our core Cisco 6509, and prepping it for our soon-to-come Wireless project.
- Stubbing out our newest Campus – launching sometime in March/April. We built the routed and switched network, provisioned the Active Directory Site and Domain Controller, added wireless, and tested all that goodness. So, that's fun.
- Provisioned a backup/secondary SIP router – we have migrated from PRI to SIP for our primary DID block(s) and will be moving toward full-SIP everywhere it makes sense. Our Primary SIP Router is a Cisco 3725 and our backup SIP Router is a Cisco 2811.
- Provisioned a backup / DR-based Cisco VG248 Voice Gateway at our DR site. Over the last year, we've worked hard to remove SPOF – single points of failure. You can read more about that project here. This VG248 will provide emergency based "walmart phones" in a true disaster situation. It also will help provide analog lines for random projects we do – kind like the Dave Ramsey Town Hall project last Spring.
- Provisioned a new physical Server 2008 R2 DC for our Central Campus.
- Provisioned two new virtual Server 2008 R2 DCs – one for Central and one for our DR site.
- Provisioned our 2x virtual Exchange 2010 Enterprise boxes – just installed the OS and joined the domain. That project will be coming very soon. One box will be at Central and one at the DR site and we will be using HA technologies for database redundancy, failover, etc.
Anyway that's a lot of stuff. And I'm still sleepy.
This next quarter (1Q2010) will be CRAZY exciting. Never boring for sure.
What's been going on in your world?