Bridge
INJOY, is a brand of Giant Impact that focuses on faith based initiatives.
One of their offerings is a simulcast event which is a satellite broadcast to over
50,000 viewers world-wide. Each location that signs up to show the event is called
a site. Giant must work closely with its sites to ensure a top quality event experience
for each attendee. Bridge was built using .NET and MS SQL Server to organize and
track site data as each site prepares for the event. The data model is built on
a hierarchy of an Event containing Sites. Each site is comprised of a site checklist,
Contact information, satellite information and more.
Screen Shots (click the smaller image for full size screen capture)
TFC-confessions
http://www.sugarhillspace.com/yourstory
This application was used to support an ongoing theme of “telling YOUR story”. Users
of this application could post their stories along with pictures. To prevent inappropriate
content the submitted story would go through an approval process. The approvers
would login to an administrative section and view a list of recently submitted stories.
There they could read the content and view the pictures prior to approving. Once
approved an email would be sent to the submitter to let them know their story was
online.
Screen Shots (click the smaller image for full size screen capture)
Data Recovery Project
The Situation
Several years ago Giant Impact purchased a SAN unit from Cybernetics,
inc. Within the past few years the unit has begun performing inconsistently. Giant
was never able to successfully connect more than one very specific computer to the
iSAN even after going through significant hardware replacement and troubleshooting
with Cybernetics. Due to the devices age and that the organization has out-grown
the storage capacity on that unit River Birch Consulting submitted a proposal to
retire the unit or relegate it to secondary non-mission critical storage and move
the files to a new storage location outlined below.
Giant is currently using a Cybernetics
HSTC in conjunction with Backup Exec for backing up their files. Giant has a current
back up of their critical files stored on the iSAN, however the files are in use
constantly and the ability to access to them needs to be maintained.
Proposal
The
proposal consisted of several different options.
- Purchase new iSAN – The most
Costly but complete solution.
- Purchase external storage, in this case it was
purposed that Giant purchase a new Power Vault from Dell, Inc.
- Purchase new larger
drives for an existing Power Vault already in use on the network.
Resolution
River
Birch worked with Tim Jones to determine that based on Giant’s current situation,
purchasing new drives for the existing Power Vault was the best solution. This would
allow Giant to expand storage to 1.36TB with minimal cost and a rapid project completion.
However...
Prior to the proposal being approved, the one server that could connect
to the iSAN began losing connectivity intermittently. Due to the nature of the files
stored there it was decided to perform an emergency purchase of new drives to be
installed in the existing Dell Power Vault. Once the new drives were installed and
configured, the data needed to be moved ASAP while connectivity to the old iSAN
was still available. The majority of the data was able to be restored from backup
and the rest was moved using a script.
Project Outcome and Follow-up
Success! The new drives are performing great and aside from the ups and downs associated with the old iSAN’s intermittent connectivity, the users of the system noticed very little outages or interruptions in their work. Things are back to normal now.
River Birch Consulting has recommended that a full Audit of the backup system be performed to make sure that all mission critical files are being backed up and further pointed out that the existing drive vault was out of warranty and should be replaced soon (1-1.5yrs).
|