By Peggy Pulliam, Secretary, Tampa PC Users Group
pegrance@yahoo.com

We had a discussion about what it means when a business says it is “Restructuring IT”; seems to be another way of saying “downsizing”. We talked about effects it might have on computer users. There will probably be a few more loose agents in the field and those who want to will be taking their chances on forming their own organization and freelancing and consulting. We could be looking at a whole new development coming soon.

We didn’t have any specific questions to cover in the Windows section of the meeting, and we went straight away to our presentation.

William LaMartin showed us a trip to a data center, Tellurian Networks, in Newton, New Jersey. He had some pictures he’d taken from his recent trip there. The building was great. It will retain its old fashioned look from outside and is in the progress of being face-lifted. It is in a quaint section of town, but when you get inside the old outside shell, you are actually in a new building with all the features of a modern data center, like thumb print entry locks to enter the secure sections. It is positioned in Newton because it is very near a Sprint location.

We saw photos of the data center where the servers were stacked one atop the other; a server is only a little over one inch thick, but contains one Terabyte, that’s 1000 Gigabytes, of hard disk space. Whew. The space is very clean and neat and kept very cool, so bring a sweater. There are “hallways” between the stacks where a mobile desk is brought to accommodate work on the servers. The one they were installing while our presenter was in the shop with his camera at the ready was for streaming media on the web. It runs Microsoft Server 2003 software. The generator to keep the place up and running in case of difficulties with the electricity was behind the building. It is amazing what power is there and how much information and business was going on in a small town behind a gentle façade of a corner building on a small town shopping street!

He took us, via pictures and web sites, to a couple of other data centers. One was here in downtown Tampa. The day of the large data center is gone, and smaller companies are taking their place. What used to be the large data centers are now also used for back-up space for larger companies.

He also showed us several virtual tours he had created at his web site, http://www.lamartin.com, using the Photo Vista software which was demonstrated at a recent meeting. The software did a great job and William presented an enlightening presentation.

Mike Hodges surprised us with a door prize donation of Windows XP Pro! Doug Mullis won the XP, and he won a fax machine too; lucky night for him. John Conrad won Spell Catcher Plus.

We hung around and talked for a while after the meeting, and some of the group went for dinner or a snack afterward! You can’t talk too much about computers. u