ANSI/BICSI 002-2019 Data Center Design and Implementation Best Practices

Purely by chance I saw a reference on-line to the BICSI document on best practices for Data Centre Design and implementation.  I had a quick look on their website and was intrigued by the document. So I took a deep breath, opened my card wallet, and purchased an electronic version of their document. At $525  (USD) it is no lightweight purchase, but I think a fair investment if you are in that line of business.    Mistakes made in the early design processes of a Data Centre can be very very expensive to fix at a later stage in the project. At the very least this document gives a good checklist of things to consider. It also usefully refers to other appropriate standards.

My line of business is more in the area of Trading Floors and their associated technology rooms, but much of the Data Centre best practices are useful to keep in mind.

I'm about 25% through the first read of this document. It is delivered in an encrypted pdf format which you need a code to activate the document. One side effect is you cannot use adobe comments to annotate individual pages. Nor can you print from the document, and while it is understandable from the publisher's viewpoint it is a pain in the butt.

It is obviously written by people exposed to the USA management style of data centers. In the accommodation section most of the technical and security areas are described, but no mention is made of canteen or recreational facilities for the operations and engineering staff. Believe it or not people are an important part of a datacenter and their welfare is important.

Oaksys Tech helping Covid-19 support Groups

As part of our work to support the local Covid-19 support group we are lending VoIP phone handsets to some of the organisers. The handsets are programmed to use the special range of distinctive numbers allocated by us to the team. To ensure good quality voice on the phone we are using Polycom desktop handsets, these are business quality devices designed for office use.  Once programmed by us, it should be just a matter of plugging the devices into the the RJ45 LAN outlet on the broadband router in the home and, after power is supplied, the devices automatically connected to the Sipgate service. The organiser team then obtain the full facilities of a distributed office PABX in their own home. It also protects the personal phone numbers of the organisers from general public exposure. There always are some weirdo's who would want to exploit personal phone numbers.

When purchased new, these handset have a price of circa £75 - £100 as they have quite powerful micro computers embedded in the device. In order to keep costs down we've purchased secondhand units from Ebay. These are fully functional older units no longer required by businesses, but look like new devices. They cost less than £20 to purchase including delivery.  The particular model we are purchasing have dual power options. You can either buyer dedicated mains power supply units delivering 24V, or they can use PoE (Power over Ethernet cable) which has power delivered via the network cable. The PoE option greatly tidies the cabling associated with using the phone, all that is needed is a single CAT5e network cable plus, in the home environment, a power injector unit close to the Broadband Router.

When used in conjunction with the Sipgate web browser interface you get "click and call" facilities from the VoIP phone with no need to dial the phone number via the handset keypad. You just click on the number and your handset rings. As soon as you pick up the phone handset, or press the speakerphone button, Sipgate will connect the call.

Well, that's all of the theory, now for the practice. When we received the secondhand devices, we found the units still had their programming from their previous owners. Some the previous programming was quite specialised. Normal configuration programming by us did not allow the phones to function correctly and connect to Sipgate. After a lot of research, we realised we had to completely wipe the memory on the phones, not just a standard "factory reset", we had to reformat the memory using a well hidden function on the phones. We then set up a FTP software server to hold the appropriate historic version of the software and basic configuration files. We were able to track the software and files down on the Polycom support website. It took quite a lot of Google research and the downloading of multipage administrator manual pdf files. Normally telecoms engineers go on training courses to learn these processes, we didn't have that luxury and spent about five hours hard work and experimentation to getting it done. Now the phone automatically visit the servers via the Internet, to pick up the latest configuration when they are powered up or restarted.

However once we'd "cleaned" the handset memory and reloaded the phones with new copies of the software they work just fine. Now that we understand the process, it is quick and easy to remotely program the handsets. It was time well spent. We're about to handover the devices to the volunteers, plus network cables and power units, all suitably sterilized with isopropyl-alcohol wipedown and exposure to UV-C disinfection lamp. 

We already use VoIP phones in the holiday cottage, but there we'd installed a brand new handset so we didn't have any configuration problems.

Edit: 21st April 2020
The only remaining problem is get the recipients of these VoIP handset to plug them in and to use them  So far the reprogrammed handsets have not been connected following delivery. There are no reported problems, though we've since discovered the recipients have called in a network engineer to resolve network problems in their home.

Event Bookings

I've recently been organising an event which needed to have tickets issued, and also capture contact details of the attendees to allow follow-up email messages. A couple years ago I'd come across www.trybooking.co.uk which is an Internet Cloud based system run by a small British company based in Kendal. I liked it then and used it successfully for some free ticket events. They don't charge a fee for free tickets. It is fully featured and takes the pain out of issuing, controlling and following up of tickets.

For the recent event I decided to charge a small fee, to weed out the non-serious prospective attendees. I've looked at several different USA based systems, but was not happy with the features. I recalled the Trybooking system and decided to give it another go. Since my last use of the system a couple of years ago they have improved an already good system. From the attendees viewpoint it works well on PCs, tablets and Smartphones. 

• Their fee for chargeable events is 15p per ticket and 5% for card processing.
• After collection, they deposit the money into your chosen bank account.
• It has a good automatic interface into our wonderful Xero accounting system.
• It handles refunds well.
• It handles VAT correctly.
• You can do gift certificates and flexible offer voucher codes.
• It has good reporting facilities.
• There's automatic interface into social media such as Facebook.
• It is easy to embed the booking interface, such as "Book Now" buttons, into other web pages.
• It is multi-user.
• It gives barcode check-in with an internet connected smartphone for multiple "gatekeepers"; reads pre printed tickets or smartphone screen tickets.
• You can view who was checked in to the event and when the check-in took place.

I'm in the process of using integromat.com and zapier.com to provide sms alerts and voice message alerts in the case of needing to announce changes to events and/or reminders that the event is about to take place. This is a bit more complicated, but doesn't require programming skills per se. The next step will be to add a squared.com interface to allow the use of touch bank card, apple pay and google pay payments at events. I'll also add an automated Mailchimp interface for marketing at some point.

For one-to-one meetings I use Acuity Scheduling. This ties into my personal Google Calendar and allows people to book meetings with me, in my free time slots from their web browser. It can also take credit/debit card payments for the meeting fees. This uses my squared.com account to process the payment. All is tied into my Xara accounting system.

Going to Exhibitions

One of the useful activities a business owner/executive can undertake is to attend national trade exhibitions. It need only take the investment of  a couple of days a year of your time, but the long term rewards can be great. It helps to keep your trade knowledge current and can help you spot new opportunities. I've been going to such exhibitions for over thirty years, and one soon learns techniques to make the best use of your time while you are visiting.

Sometimes it is worthwhile visiting stands where you already know the exhibitors quite well, because it gives them the opportunity to show you new products and services they might not show to you during the normal course of business. However the best opportunities are obtained by cruising the exhibition floor and stopping by stands that might have a product/service that piques your interest. 

Often conversations with exhibitors will lead on to discoveries you'd not seen at first glance as you pass the exhibition stand. You soon learn to ignore the trinkets artfully placed on the stand to slow you down and thus give the salesman a chance to descend on you. You also learn to avoid eye contact with the barkers/touts who are engaged to engage you with chance conversation. Your time, spent getting to and attending, is precious, save it for those products which are genuinely interesting.

I tend to ignore the "seminars", mostly the information is boring and a poor return for your investment.

However some exhibition organisers can go over the top in "preparing" you for the exhibition, taking a nannying and patronising approach! Here's an extract from one of the multiple emails arriving in advance.

"Check your route"...  I travel the globe on my own for business, finding the location of of an exhibition is not exactly difficult! The people sending these types of emails were probably just cells in the ovaries of a young teenage girl when I started attending trade exhibitions.

Why pay excessive phone tariffs?

We have a colleague working over in Saudi Arabia. The standard BT call tariff to  her landline is £1.45 per minute, plus a 23 pence call setup charge.  Fortunately with are using Google GSuite and it's associated Google Voice. The cost per minute is £0.07 and no call set up charge. Our last call was 62 minutes long and cost us £4.54.  If we'd used BT it would have been: £90.22 for the same duration.

If you need to make good sound quality International business calls, look no further than Google Voice. If you are calling the USA, the rates are even better, the calls are free. An incoming direct dial phone line is about £5 a month. The Google software allows you to administer call services for the team and as an option you can have the usual PABX facilities.

What happens to your email in a crash?

Imagine the situation; you are working on your PC reading your email and suddenly the lights go out. There's been a power failure. When you return to your PC and switch it back on, nothing happens. It will not restart. The disk has been corrupted during the power failure. You suddenly get that sinking feeling when you remember that all of your emails and attachments for the past five years are on that PC.

"You did do a routine back-up of your email database. Didn't you?"

"Your back-up file was on the hard disk? Now you really are stuffed aren't you?"

"No, not to worry; I keep a copy of my documents on Dropbox, so I'll be okay."

"Didn't you keep a copy of your email database on Dropbox? No? Oh dear!"

I've heard this scenario all too often. It is a great pity when you realise that you can keep a copy of your important files offsite on Amazon for a few pence.  Amazon's AWS Glacier storage allows archive of files cheaply with a retrieval time of just a few hours. It works out at about half a cent/penny per gigabyte per month. You can have a faster retrieval on AWS, but that is slightly more expensive.

More about this, and how to achieve it, later...

I've just done that for my wife's email - it was 8 Gbytes!  The peace of mind is priceless.

USA transaction fees

Some of our websites are hosted in the USA. The bills in $USD for this are charged to my business Visa Card. The bank converts this USD amount to pounds GBP.  For each transaction there's a foreign currency processing fee starting at 1 GBP and increasing with the value of the transaction. It is not listed as a separate bank fee in the bank statement so it is easy to overlook. This can represent up to 10% of some bills.

I've just been through our list of overseas suppliers and have changed the credit card on file to one of my Revolut Debit cards. There's no foreign currency transaction fee and it is at the Interbank Exchange rate.  Less money to the greedy banks.