Well it's been over a year since my last post, been busy. I now have a 1 day a week part time TechOps assistant, Matt, who is able to get a lot of the strange request tasks etc. done that I just can't seem to get to. He got our Sacred Grounds Cafe Digital Signage app working and they now have their menus displayed on 2 55" flat screen 1080p TVs, way cool.
We've had the new VOIP Switchvox phone system up and running for over a year now and all is working well. We are going to be adding an IP paging system and more phones to allow for paging the church areas in case of intrusion etc.. It is all part of our Reducing the Risk initiative.
Mark Moreno was in back in May and we are working on taking us out of SBS 2008 and moving us to individual server (all virtual of course) for AD / DNS / DHCP, Exchange 2013, SQL Server 2012 and all will be based on 2012 servers, using Microsoft System Center 2012 to manage the clusters.
We are also implementing our disaster recovery system through C&M Support Services, as well as our Antivirus and machine management software from N-Able.
I was able to get 2 more compute modules with dual cpus and 48GB ram off eBay for much less than I was going to purchase a new module, so we are able to do the work on the VMs that we want to do.
I also got a couple of Ruckus 7982's and replaced the 7363's in the Worship Center with them increasing our capacity from approximately 500 to 1000 connections. I also replace the 7363 in the Atrium with a 7962 for better coverage.
I'm also working on getting a new 50/50 Comcast Fiber feed into the church so that we can increase the quality of our Wowza livestream service on Sundays and also give us the bandwidth to stream our service to our new location in Kutztown when we open that up in 2014. We are still looking at encoders and decoders as well as if we will use Zixi service or what to get the best quality. Thanks to all my colleagues on the Church IT Network I have been getting a lot of feed back on what hardware and service to use and not use.
Well, that's all for now. More to come when I have time. Back to my free Networking course at Coursera.org (great place).
