Dear CIO/IT managers,
This CPTTM CIO newsletter is to bring useful news to you, CIO/IT managers in Macau, for references without obligations, so that you can do your jobs easier and better! Hope you like it. if you'd like to unsubscribe or recommend your friends to subscribe, just let me know. Old issues are available here.
Kent Tong, Editor in ChiefOne of the best practices in ITIL is "Make sure you have the right
capacity at the right time". At CPTTM we monitor the utilization of
CPU, RAM, hard disk of our servers and that of Internet bandwidth like:
How to use this information? For one instance, we allocated 512MB to a Win2K3 VM because our engineer insisted that it would need at least 512MB, otherwise it would be very slow. But the chart showed that it always had about 340MB free. So we decided to take away 256MB from it and use that to run a Win2K server in another VM (thus reducing the Win2K3's total memory from 512MB to about 256MB). Both the Win2K3 and Win2K servers are working well and there is no sign of slowing down.
As another example, we were deploying a VM running a Linux mail server. Where to put this VM? We had two existing suitable servers. The charts showed that one server consistently had 270MB RAM free and its CPU utialized at 2%, while another had 30MB RAM free and its CPU utilized at 67%. So we chose the former.
By using such simple charts, we have saved the cost of buying a new
server and made a smart decision in deploying new services. How hard
was it to set it up? Just download zabbix
and you'll be seeing reports in a couple of days. It's open source and
easy to use. If you prefer commercial heavy weight products, try
Tivoli, Unicenter or OpenView.
After becoming an ISO standard on office document formats, the
OpenDocument Format (ODF) is now adopted by the entire Belgium
government
and several ministries of the Denmark government. Document exchanges
with them will
be in ODF. For more info, see here
and here.
The French Police will deploy OpenOffice on more than 400,000 PC's. For more info, see here.
In a surprise move, Microsoft announces that it will sponsor an open
source project to develop a filter in MS Office to convert between its
Open XML format (used in MS Office 2007) and ODF. It means we can
now adopt ODF without worrying that people can't open our files or
that we can't open MS Office files. For more info, see here.
Any questions, ideas or experiences to share? Contact me at 781313 or kent at cpttm dot org dot mo.
Until next time,
Kent Tong