Neuton Power — Still Positive

I was not able to get to my yard for 3 weeks so the grass was once more 4-5″ high and a bit damp from all the rain we had. My Neuton Power 6.3 mowed this down with no issues. The old Black & Decker CMM1000 in its heyday still would have taken 3 days to complete. While I took 2 days to finish everything with the Neuton Power it was not the lack of charge that slowed me down. But my own abilities to do everything in one day. Next time I fully expect to use just one battery charge for the entire yard. 1 charge got 3/4s of the field and the second battery wiped out the rest of the upper deck brush and the other half of the yard.  This included using the weed whacker attachment. I know it is hard to picture my yard but let me tell you this is a vast improvement and the yard looks much better now. Continue reading “Neuton Power — Still Positive”

Neuton Power — Going Green with Yard Work

I have documented my steps to go green within my small data center. But I have been going green with yard work for years as I have been using a battery powered mower for over 15 years.  But now I have found something much better and it will save me in charging costs moving forward. What is this? Neuton Power CE6.3 Lawn Mower.

Over 15 years ago, when I lived in Austin TX, Austin had a trade in program: Bring your gas mower in and we will give you a voucher to buy a brand new electric corded or battery mower. I took advantage of this and purchased a Black and Decker CMM1000 24 Volt lawn mower. It did yeoman work while it lasted even with all its problems. Continue reading “Neuton Power — Going Green with Yard Work”

DISC Blu-Safe to the Rescue

In my desire to limit the amount of power my Virtual Environment draws, I am in the midst of decommissioning my DLT4 Tape Libraries in favor of a DISC Blu-Safe which holds 15 50GB Read/Erasable (RE) Blu-Ray disks. This unit draws less power than my larger Dell PowerVault 128T or the Breecehill Q7 I used previously while also much smaller in size so it can fit better within my reduced rack space design. Lastly, this device is USB 2.0 based and not SCSI based. So attaching it directly to a VM like I could with my SCSI device is not an option. Continue reading “DISC Blu-Safe to the Rescue”

VMware ESX, upgrade to 4GB Switch – Redundancy is what it is about!

In my previous post I explained how SVMotion saved the day, this blog post is about the need for storage fabric redundancy. Storage fabric/network redundancy makes simple upgrades work without the need to power off any VMs or virtualization hosts. My recent upgrade to a Brocade 240E went smoothly once I could access the device. Continue reading “VMware ESX, upgrade to 4GB Switch – Redundancy is what it is about!”

SVMotion Saves the Day on SAN Move

The last major modification to my datacenter occured on friday. I physically relocated my SAN and its UPS. I have been reducing the size of my datacenter, as I documented in VMotion – Redundant Power Supplies Aid in Migration, and started to document in Upgrading My SAN.  I was waiting on this move until the new, much shorter, fibre cables arrived. Which they did earlier in the week.

Continue reading “SVMotion Saves the Day on SAN Move”