This is a stylish HTPC case with fold down front and loads of space for hard drives. This is a reluctant sale but it doesn’t fit in a new tv cabinet. The space inside this case is cavernous, but it does mean the case is huge so please check the dimensions carefully!
The case can house a full size ATX and micro-ATX boards, full size ATX PSU, 2 external 5.25” and 3.5” bays, and 4 internal 3.5” bays. Comes with 2 80mm fans at the rear with space for a further 80mm fan and at the front and on the side. The front panel includes 2 USB 3.0 and a IEEE1394 ports along side audio and mic connectors, all behind the front fold down cover. This case has it all and could easily house a gaming rig if required.
Now the important bit, dimensions: 430 x 171.5 x 439.6mm (W, H, D).
It will come in the original box with a bag of bolts and connectors.
Cost £55 collected from Bristol, postage will cost an additional £8.40 by My Hermes, fully insured
Price and currency: 55 Delivery: Delivery cost is not included Payment method: cash on collection, bank transfer or PayPal Location: Bristol Advertised elsewhere?: Advertised elsewhere Prefer goods collected?: I have no preference
______________________________________________________ This message is automatically inserted in all classifieds forum threads. By replying to this thread you agree to abide by the trading rules detailed here. Please be advised, all buyers and sellers should satisfy themselves that the other party is genuine by providing the following via private conversation to each other after negotiations are complete and prior to dispatching goods and making payment:
Landline telephone number. Make a call to check out the area code and number are correct, too
Name and address including postcode
Valid e-mail address
DO NOT proceed with a deal until you are completely satisfied with all details being correct. It’s in your best interest to check out these details yourself.
In a previous post, I introduced you to VM groups in Hyper-V and demonstrated how to work with them using PowerShell. I’m still working with them to see how I will incorporate them into my everyday Hyper-V work, but I already know that I wish the cmdlets for managing groups worked a little differently. But that’s not a problem. I can create my own tooling around these commands and build a solution that works for me. Let me share what I’ve come up with so far.
1. Finding Groups
As I explained last time, you can have a VM group that contains a collection of virtual machines, or nested management groups. By default, Get-VMGroup will return all groups. Yes, you can filter by name but you can’t filter by group type. If I want to see only Management groups, I need to use a PowerShell expression like this:
This is not a complicated expression but it becomes tedious when I am repeatedly typing or modifying this command. This isn’t an issue in a script, but for everyday interactive work, it can be a bit much. My solution was to write a new command, Find-VMGroup, that works identically to Get-VMGroup except this version allows you to specify a group type.
Your output might vary from the screenshot but I think you get the idea. The default is to return all groups, but then you might as well use Get-VMGroup. And because the group type is coded into the function, you can use tab complete to select a value.
Interested in getting the Find-VMGroup command? I have a section on how to install the module a little further down the page.
2. Expanding Groups
Perhaps the biggest issue (and even that might be a bit strong) I had with the VM Group command is that ultimately, what I really want are the members of the group. I want to be able to use groups to do something with all of the members of that group. And by members, I mean virtual machines. It doesn’t matter to me if the group is a VM Collection or Management Collection. Show me the virtual machines!
Again, this isn’t technically difficult.
If you haven’t figured out by now I prefer simple. Getting virtual machines from a management group requires even more steps. Once again, I wrote my own command called Expand-VMGroup.
The output has been customized a bit to provide a default, formatted view. There are in fact other properties you could work with.
Depending on the command, you might be able to pipe these results to another Hyper-V command. But I know that many of the Hyper-V cmdlets will take pipeline input by value. This allows you to pass a list of virtual machine names to a command. I added a parameter to Expand-VMGroup that will write just the virtual machine names to the pipeline as a list. Now I can run commands like this:
Again, the module containing this command can be found near the end of the article and can be installed using Install-Module
3. Starting and Stopping Groups
The main reason I want to use VM groups is to start and stop groups of virtual machines all at once. I could use Expand-VMGroup and pipe results to Start-VM or Stop-VM but I decided to make specific commands for starting and stopping all virtual machine members of a group. If a member of the group is already in the targeted state, it is skipped.
The third member of this group was already running so it was skipped. Now I’ll shut down the group.
It may not seem like much but every little thing I can do to get more done with less typing and effort is worth my time. I’m using full parameter names and typing out more than I actually need to for the sake of clarity.
How Do I Get These Commands
Normally, I would show you code samples that you could use. But in this case, I think these commands are ready to use as-is. You can get the commands from my PSHyperVTools module which is free to install from the PowerShell Gallery.
1
Install-ModulePSHyperVTools
If you haven’t installed anything before you might get a prompt to update the version of nuget. Go ahead and say yes. You’ll also be prompted if you want to install from a non-trusted repository. You aren’t installing this on a mission-critical server so you should be OK. Once installed, you can use the commands that I’ve demonstrated. They should all have help and examples.
The module is open source so if you’d like to review the code first or the README, jump over to https://github.com/jdhitsolutions/PSHyperV. There are a few other commands and features of the module that I hope to write about in a future article or two. But for now, I hope you’ll give these commands a spin and let me know what you think in the comments section below!
Now, staff can build annual reports with Teams, easily sharing multiple source documents while knowing that team members are always working with the most current versions. As with every other aspect of work life for Tony’s employees, that strategy is carefully aligned with company values. “We use the chat feature in Teams to build the personal relationships we want to encourage,” says Ursem. “Email is more formal, more time-consuming. Chat lends itself to the shared humor and quick check-ins that naturally fit our culture and make us more efficient.”
With Teams, Tony’s team members have an informal, easy way to collaborate on projects with each other and with suppliers by using Teams Rooms. For IT Manager Rick van Doorn, otherwise known as Chocomatic Fanatic, nurturing spirit drives key decisions made by company leadership. “We say that our team comes first,” he explains. “Without the team, there is no company. And keeping that team collaborating optimally is vitally important to everything we do.”
Since implementing Teams, the company has averaged a 10 to 15 percent decrease in its total email volume. Ursem and van Doorn point out that this is happening despite steady company growth. “We’re pushing communication to the channels where it can happen most effectively,” says van Doorn.
A new world of work The company focuses intently on messaging, both internally and externally. Even the design of its chocolate bars has a message – each bar is divided into unequal pieces, to mirror the inequalities in traditional profit sharing.
Internally, employees mix up workspaces every six months, sharing space with colleagues from different departments to build stronger team relations. That dedication to cultivating teamwork led the company to experiment with various apps purported to propel teamwork forward.
One of the biggest successes to come out of this experimentation was consolidating telephony with Office 365 in April 2019. As a result, employees can now access the company landline through Teams with the Vodafone Calling in Office 365 solution. For customer contact, Teams is extended with the Anywhere365 Contact Center. Because the solution interoperates with Salesforce, incoming calls can be logged in the company’s customer relationship management system for inclusion in the customer database.
“Using Teams with Vodafone Calling in Microsoft Office 365 amplifies the personal and transparent approach we’re known for,” says van Doorn. “We can talk to our chocofans with full knowledge of their prior backgrounds, orders, and feedback.” Incoming calls automatically route to the best person to handle the call, no matter where that person is, and contact information is included for the convenience of the person receiving the call.
A future in the cloud Ten years ago, the company migrated to the cloud. “We were growing rapidly and needed to be scalable,” recalls van Doorn. “And we also looked at the growing number of relationships we were managing—both customers and suppliers, plus our rapidly expanding staff. We felt that committing to a complicated IT landscape in terms of connections, interfaces, and equipment would have been a risk.”
Cross-functional collaboration also underpins daily and strategic operations at Tony’s Chocolonely. Teamwork fans out from internal teams to a swath of partners that support different aspects of operations, including web developers, product wrapper suppliers, retail stores, and many more.
The company is so committed in fact, that its suppliers also now collaborate in Teams. “We’ve implemented the entire Microsoft 365 suite,” van Doorn. “All of our data is on SharePoint. With this modern working platform, we can easily collaborate with our partners, suppliers, and with each other.” The company also hopes to reduce business travel expenses by 10 percent now that so much collaboration takes place in the cloud.
For the people behind the Tony’s Chocolonely brand, it comes down to relationships. “By growing long-term relationships and paying a higher price—above the market price plus the Fairtrade Premium—to West African farmers, we’re trying to create an equal partnership,” says Ursem. “And if we’re performing well, other companies will be inspired to shoulder this responsibility, too.”
Ok…It is an Asus T200-TA, with 11.6″ screen, Intel Quad core 1.6 gHz Atom Z3795 processor. The operating system is on a 32GB eMMC drive and there is a second 500GB HDD for storage. It has 4MB of RAM and is currently running Windows 8.1…it did run Windows 10 Pro until an update about 6 months ago knocked out the touch-screen capability, so I reverted it back to win 8.1 and everything works fine. It is a 2-in-1 laptop, meaning the screen detaches from the keyboard so you can use it as a tablet…hence the touch screen working was important.
It was my daughter’s but she never got on with it having the two hard drives…so it was lightly used by her, and consequently it is in pretty good condition, almost unmarked.
There is a very slight nick in the charger cable, but I have masked it with a bit of insulating tape… or, if you prefer, a new charger could be bought on ebay.
Any further info required, I will try my best to answer.
Pristine condition Dell XPS 13” laptop. It is the highest spec model, with upgraded processor. Specs are:-
Quad core Intel Core i7-8550U processor
4K IPS touch screen
16GB RAM
512GB NVMe drive
Windows Hello fingerprint reader
Windows Hello IR facial recognition
Windows 10 Professional
I am selling because I have realised I am a Mac guy and I tried this for a few months but have bought myself a new MacBook Pro instead. It comes with the extended on-site warranty, I added 4y at the time I bought it and there is over 3y left to run (expires 27 Nov 2022). It can easily be transferred to the new owner with an online form on the Dell site which I will obviously do. You can buy in confidence knowing that Dell will turn up to your house and fix any issues with it should any occur. It has been working perfectly for me the whole time I’ve used it.
I will also throw in a Minix USB-C hub which has 2xUSB 3 ports and HDMI out. The power supply is unused as I was using a MacBook Pro USB-C charger with it.
On later models, Dell upgraded the NVMe drives on them. This has a Samsung PM981 drive and it is crazy fast, 3000 reads speeds and nearly 2000 write (see screenshots of CrystalMark)
Price and currency: 975 Delivery: Delivery cost is included within my country Payment method: BT or PPG Location: Harrogate Advertised elsewhere?: Advertised elsewhere Prefer goods collected?: I have no preference
______________________________________________________ This message is automatically inserted in all classifieds forum threads. By replying to this thread you agree to abide by the trading rules detailed here. Please be advised, all buyers and sellers should satisfy themselves that the other party is genuine by providing the following via private conversation to each other after negotiations are complete and prior to dispatching goods and making payment:
Landline telephone number. Make a call to check out the area code and number are correct, too
Name and address including postcode
Valid e-mail address
DO NOT proceed with a deal until you are completely satisfied with all details being correct. It’s in your best interest to check out these details yourself.
Dgraph Labs Inc. is set to grow its graph database technology with the help of a cash infusion of venture financing.
The company was founded in 2015 as an effort to advance the state of graph database technology. Dgraph Labs’ founder and CEO Manish Jain previously worked at Google, where he led a team that was building out graph database systems. Jain decided there was a need for a high-performance graph database technology that could address different enterprise use cases.
Dgraph said July 31 it had completed an $11.5 million Series A funding round.
The Dgraph technology is used by a number of different organizations and projects. Among them is Intuit, which uses Dgraph as the back-end graph database for its’ open source project K-Atlas.
“We were looking for a graph database with high performance in querying large-scale data sets, fully distributed, highly available and as cloud-native as possible,” said Dawei Ding, engineering manager at Intuit.
Ding added that Dgraph’s graph database technology stood out from both architectural design as well as performance benchmarking perspective. Moreover, he noted that being fully open sourced made Dgraph an even more attractive solution for Intuit’s open source software project.
The graph database landscape
Multiple technologies are available in the graph database landscape, including from Neo4j, Amazon Neptune and DataStax Enterprise Graph, among others. In Jain’s view, many graph database technologies are actually graph layers, rather than full graph databases.
“By graph layer, what I mean is that they don’t control storage; they just overlay a graph layer on top of some other database,” Jain said.
So, for example, he said a common database used by graph layer-type technologies is Apache Cassandra or, in Amazon’s case, Amazon Aurora.
Graph database of all the movies directed by Steven Spielberg, their country of filming, genres, actors in those movies and the characters played by those actors.
“The problem with that approach is that to do the graph traversal or to do a graph join, you need to first bring the data to the layer before you can interact with it and do interesting things on it,” Jain commented. “So, there’s multiple back and forth steps and, therefore, the performance likely will decrease.”
In contrast, the founding principle behind Dgraph was that graph database technology could be developed that can scale horizontally while also upping performance, because the database controls how data is stored on disk.
Open source and the enterprise
Dgraph is an open source project and hit its 1.0 milestone in December 2017. The project has garnered more than 10,000 stars on GitHub, which Jain points to as a measure of the undertaking’s popularity.
Going a step further is the company’s Dgraph Enterprise platform, which provides more capabilities that an organization might need for support, access control and management. Jain said Dgraph Labs is using the open core model, in which the open source application is free to use, but then if an organization wants certain features, it must pay for it.
Jain stressed that the core open source project is functional on its own — so much so that an organization could choose to run a 20 node Dgraph cluster with replication and consistency for free.
Why graph databases matter
We were looking for a graph database with high performance in querying large-scale data sets, fully distributed, highly available and as cloud-native as possible.Dawei DingEngineering manager, Intuit
A problem with typical relational databases is that with every data model comes a new table, or new schema, and, over time, that can become a scaling challenge, Jain said. He added that in the relational database approach, large data sets tend to become siloed over time as well. With a graph database, it is possible to unify disparate data sources.
As an example of how a graph database technology approach can help to eliminate isolated data sources, Jain said one of Dgraph’s largest enterprise customers took 60 different vertical data silos stored in traditional database and put all of it into a Dgraph database.
“Now, they’re able to run queries across all of these data sets, to be able to power not only their apps, but also power real-time analytics,” Jain said.
What’s next for Dgraph Labs
With the new funding, Jain said the plan is to open new offices for the company as well as expand the graph database technology.
One key area of future expansion is building a Dgraph cloud managed service. Another area that will be worked on is third-party integration, with different technologies such as Apache Spark for data analysis.
“Now that we have a bunch of big companies using Dgraph, they need some additional features, like, for example, encryption, and so we are putting a good chunk of our time into building out capabilities,” he said.
The new Asigra appliance can’t be bought — only rented.
Asigra has partnered with Zadara Storage to release the Asigra Cloud OpEx Appliance. The device is Zadara’s Virtual Private Storage Appliance (VPSA) pre-installed with Asigra’s backup software. Like Zadara’s storage-as-a-service (STaaS) offerings, the Asigra appliance is sold as a subscription, essentially making it a backup appliance as-a-Service.
Asigra will ship the device to the customer’s data center or colocation. All of the storage, controllers and disks are managed. The end customer doesn’t need to bring any storage expertise to the table. All the data is encrypted such that only the end customer can see it — their managed service provider (MSP) can’t.
Asigra sells its products exclusively through channel partners, many of which are MSPs that provide backup-as-a-service (BaaS) and disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) to end customers. The revenue model of MSPs is subscription-based, but traditionally, procuring storage is based on projected consumption. This means MSPs could end up buying more storage than they need.
Eran Farajun, executive vice president of Asigra, said by buying Asigra backup on an appliance on a pay-as-you-go basis, MSPs avoid overprovisioning and will only pay for the storage they use. Many of Asigra’s MSPs were using Asigra’s backup and Zadara’s STaaS separately, and Farajun said they were the ones who first brought up the idea of packaging the two.
“We’re really just responding to what our market has been asking for,” Farajun said.
Asigra only makes backup software, and all of its converged backup appliances come from partnerships with hardware vendors. The company started in 1986, but didn’t release its first device with pre-installed backup software until 2015 through a partnership with SuperMicro. Asigra began packaging software on iXsystems appliances in 2018.
The Asigra Cloud OpEx Appliance is based on Zadara’s Virtual Private Storage Appliance.
Marc Staimer, president and founder of Dragon Slayer Consulting, said MSPs operate in a world where capital expenditure (capex) is going against an operational expenditure (opex) revenue stream. Money is made when the streams cross, but MSPs would rather have their costs and revenue be in alignment.
Many of the costs of running a service provider business fall under capex. Staimer said service providers who use the public cloud to provide BaaS and DRaaS need to purchase storage in a high-cost, high-performance tier to ensure fast recovery as well as a low-cost, high-capacity tier to keep overall costs down. According to Staimer, the performance tier costs six times more than the capacity tier.
MSPs also must provision hardware for their end customers. Staimer said MSPs are typically expected to provide the hardware at no cost, as it’s a necessary component of their services.
The Asigra appliance solves both of these problems because it’s entirely pay-as-you-go, with no upfront investment.
“People want a pure opex model,” Staimer said. “It’s a very good move on Asigra’s part.”
The Asigra Cloud OpEx Appliance is generally available now and starts at 30 terabytes of capacity and can scale up to petabytes. Pricing starts at pennies per gigabyte per month.
The Cloud OpEx Appliance uses Asigra’s flagship Asigra Cloud Backup Evolved software. Farajun said he expects updates to the core backup software in early 2020, including security enhancements and better integration with VMware.
Farajun said the next update will also focus on integrating with Microsoft Office 365’s Teams and Groups applications, as well as other cloud-based SaaS applications. He noted he has been seeing more customers realizing the need to protect their SaaS data.
Google hopes to advance its third-place standing in the public cloud market with additional cloud migration tools and enterprise-friendly features to entice more workloads onto the platform.
Migrate for Compute Engine can now move virtual machines from Microsoft Azure to Google Cloud, although the feature is in beta. Previously, Migrate for Compute Engine supported only migrations from AWS.
Google has also expanded support for service mesh, which provides a communication layer for application components to talk to one another. It’s favored for microservices-based application architectures and relieves the burden on developers to inject and maintain networking code in their apps.
Traffic Director, Google’s take on a service mesh control plane that was unveiled at Cloud Next in April, is now generally available, according to a blog post. Google terms Traffic Director as a global traffic manager for VMs and container workloads. It is now available for use with Anthos, the Kubernetes-based multi-cloud container management platform that became generally available in April.
Traffic Director provides a Google-managed version of Pilot, the traffic-management component of Istio, a popular open source service mesh launched by Google, IBM and Lyft in 2017. Pilot manages traffic between microservices on the network through the Envoy sidecar proxy, which executes the distributed networking functionality for apps.
If I’m just giving you a container platform that can run anywhere, there are a lot of companies that can do that with Kubernetes.Gary ChenAnalyst, IDC
Google’s Layer 7 Internal Load Balancer is now in beta and based on Traffic Director and Envoy. It will give users comprehensive traffic control capabilities with the feel of a traditional load balancer, ideal for projects that involve legacy app migration to service mesh, according to Google.
Anthos is Google’s long-term multi-cloud play
Google has positioned Anthos as an ideal platform for companies that want to achieve parity for container workloads across multiple clouds and their own data centers. Anthos, which is built on Kubernetes, gives customers the ability to refactor applications once and then run them anywhere, according to Google.
While Google is happy to make money from customers that move VM workloads to Compute Engine, it also sees an opportunity for Anthos as a platform for application modernization. Companies that convert VMs to containers via Anthos Migrate get benefits, such as no more need to manually patch their OS, Google said in the blog.
Anthos is aimed at large enterprises and is priced accordingly. One clear rival is Red Hat’s OpenShift, which has similar intent around cross-platform workload portability, albeit with some technical differences. Now that the IBM acquisition of Red Hat is closed, Big Blue likely will unleash its massive global sales force to support OpenShift.
Gary Chen
Although Google said it plans to offer Anthos on other public clouds, specific timelines are unclear. “I’m taking more of a wait-and-see attitude to see how that really turns out,” said Gary Chen, an analyst with IDC. Anthos is strongly tied to the Google Cloud, and its true value may be its association and integrations with other Google Cloud services, such as for big data analytics and machine learning.
“If I’m just giving you a container platform that can run anywhere, there are a lot of companies that can do that with Kubernetes,” Chen said.
Even as Google seeks to convert VM workloads to containers for Anthos, it has acknowledged a need to work with VMWare on other fronts. This week, the companies announced the upcoming availability of a VMWare on Google Cloud service.
Ultimately, enterprise customers have more choices to port VMware workloads onto the public cloud, but they must now weigh considerations such as relative costs and the strength of associated partner ecosystems.
StorONE has announced S1 as a Service, which integrates StorONE’s S1 storage service with Dell Technologies and Mellanox hardware.
One of the key components to S1aaS is the Total Resource Utilization (TRU) feature. This feature maximizes communication channels and balance between storage media and CPU utilization, according to StorONE. Additionally, one platform supports all storage services, all protocols and all media types.
StorONE designed TRU over the course of eight years and aims to remove underutilization in order to give customers 80% more capacity and performance from the same hardware. StorONE claims this gives the lowest capital expenditure and operational expenditure costs available.
Additionlly, S1 gives users hardware freedom, where they are not locked into a particular vendor’s pricing or portfolio. S1 is software-defined storage, which enables IT admins to manage shared storage resources through a single dashboard.
A study by ESG Research in 2017 about European storage trends found that nearly 60% of organizations have deployed or are looking into software-defined storage, while 21% are interested in it in the long term.
In an effort to improve data protection, StorONE designed S1 to speed up drive rebuild times, replace dedicated hot spares with an abstracted system with more granular resiliency and reduce costs. StorONE also uses erasure coding to give users unlimited, nestable, writable and persistent snapshots.
S1aaS can be deployed on premises but is available with a cloudlike subscription model. Organizations are billed monthly, quarterly or yearly, and capacity and performance are user-defined. Pricing starts at $999 per month for an 18 TB all-flash array (AFA), delivering 150,000 IOPS. For $1,797 per month, users receive a 36 TB AFA, delivering 250,000 IOPS. The 54 TB AFA and 300,000 IOPS option costs $2,497 per month.
This is a stylish HTPC case with fold down front and loads of space for hard drives. This is a reluctant sale but it doesn’t fit in a new tv cabinet. The space inside this case is cavernous, but it does mean the case is huge so please check the dimensions carefully!
The case can house a full size ATX and micro-ATX boards, full size ATX PSU, 2 external 5.25” and 3.5” bays, and 4 internal 3.5” bays. Comes with 2 80mm fans at the rear with space for a further 80mm fan and at the front and on the side. The front panel includes 2 USB 3.0 and a IEEE1394 ports along side audio and mic connectors, all behind the front fold down cover. This case has it all and could easily house a gaming rig if required.
Now the important bit, dimensions: 430 x 171.5 x 439.6mm (W, H, D).
It will come in the original box with a bag of bolts and connectors.
Cost £55 collected from Bristol, postage will cost an additional £8.40 by My Hermes, fully insured
Price and currency: 55 Delivery: Delivery cost is not included Payment method: cash on collection, bank transfer or PayPal Location: Bristol Advertised elsewhere?: Advertised elsewhere Prefer goods collected?: I have no preference
______________________________________________________ This message is automatically inserted in all classifieds forum threads. By replying to this thread you agree to abide by the trading rules detailed here. Please be advised, all buyers and sellers should satisfy themselves that the other party is genuine by providing the following via private conversation to each other after negotiations are complete and prior to dispatching goods and making payment:
Landline telephone number. Make a call to check out the area code and number are correct, too
Name and address including postcode
Valid e-mail address
DO NOT proceed with a deal until you are completely satisfied with all details being correct. It’s in your best interest to check out these details yourself.
