The presentation we had on a cloud-based virtual environment was quite interesting. We ended up going for just under two hours on the topic. Lots of technical discussion on how it works, the software choices and issues such as scalability, security, privacy, etc. all came up.

I may just have to sign up for a trial account just to see how it behaves. I’ve seen a number of environments that had this idea over the past 10 years, but this one may be “the one.” The concept is good, the timing is good and the implementation appears to be solid. It has pretty much anything you could want for a small virtual office and it offloads having a desktop support person on site. This is not to say there isn’t room for improvement and extra features, but the foundations appear to be solid and all of the basics are covered.

It seems to have propagated rather quickly. I suspect some web-caching devices may take longer, but the three different external sites I have tried all show it as up and visible. That’s rather encouraging really.

For those looking for a web host, I have managed to find a couple of Canadian ones that have reasonable rates. I’ll post some info later, as I’d like to pull a couple of sites I have in the US back to Canada. One looks really good, but doesn’t offer secure connectivity. That I can’t really deal with. Another offers SFTP, so that’s a step in the right direction. Ideally ssh is my connectivity of choice, as it makes editing go so much faster.

I’m, changing ISPs and as a result, the site may end up down while I get everything fixed up. Hopefully the changes will occur overnight and it will be quick and dirty, but I am not sure how long it will take for the changes to propagate. The short answer is that I’m expecting it all to be transparent, but you never know.

For those on the job lookout, there is a career fair happening on Thursday and Friday (May 20-21).  Free registration and more info in the URL below:

http://www.itoottawa.com/events/index.html

Good luck!

Andrea

Title: June Meeting
Location: Pythian
Link out: Click here
Description:

This month we will be having a presentation from Eseri on virtual environments. Their description follows:

Cloud Computing technology is progressing at several layers - OS virtualization, data-center virtualization, browser based application delivery, and desktop virtualization. Eseri is a local company that has integrated a full organization IT solution from the best of the world’s open source, from hosted Intranet to desktops to applications, and host it in the cloud for access on virtual desktops. Eseri CTO and VP Engineering will demonstrate their solution, describe the architecture, and discuss the security advantages of the virtual desktop approach to the cloud.